RevSportz Comment
As Manchester United sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand of mediocrity, the temptation to look at the past with rose-tinted glasses becomes overwhelming. But Erik ten Hag, who walked onto the Old Trafford pitch at the final whistle on Tuesday night with all the enthusiasm of a man approaching the electric chair, is not the first manager to lead the club through such a dismal European campaign. Back in 2005-06, as he was approaching two decades in charge of the club, Sir Alex Ferguson saw his team finish rock-bottom of a group that included Villarreal (Spain), Benfica (Portugal) and Lille (France).
But the similarities end there. That was a United side in transition, with Roy Keane – the beating heart for over a decade – unceremoniously kicked out and others enduring a dip. United still finished second in the league that season, behind Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea. Over the next 30 months, they would wrest back the title and beat Chelsea on penalties in the Champions League final in Moscow.
Anyone who says they can see a similar turnaround happening now would immediately be dragged away for a breathlyser or drug test. The gulf between Manchester City, Liverpool and even Arsenal is so huge that not even delusional young supporters expect the title to return to Old Trafford any time soon. As for the Champions League, it could be a while before they even qualify again.
In physics, a black hole is defined as ‘an area in space that nothing, not even light, can escape from’. In the decade since Ferguson left, United have become the football equivalent, where great coaches and players come to be exposed as ordinary. Louis van Gaal, whose stodgy rebuilding style won him few admirers, left with the lowest win percentage of his career – 54 wins in 103 games. Jose Mourinho, who had won the Champions League with both Porto and Internazionale, left after 84 wins in 144 games, the worst ratio of his illustrious career till then.
For now, ten Hag (52 wins from 86 matches) has better numbers than both. But United are already well off the pace in the Premier League, and their next game takes them to Anfield, where Liverpool steamrollered them 7-0 last season.
This Champions League campaign offered ample evidence of why Ten Hag has so many sceptics despite a third-place finish in his first season. United squandered leads home and away to Galatasaray. Away to FC Copenhagen, who took second place in the group, they led 3-2 despite a red card for Marcus Rashford in the first half. Their combined haul from those three games was a point.
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“To score three goals in each of their away games and to come away with the points they did is criminal really,” said Rio Ferdinand, United legend, on TNT Sports. “To score that many goals in the group stage – 12 in the group stage but they conceded 15.
“That’s kamikaze football, that’s basketball football, we attack, you attack. And they got their just rewards because if you can’t close matches out, then you don’t deserve to go through to the knockout stages.”
The 12 goals that United scored, by the way, was as many as Bayern did in their six games. Costly errors from Andre Onana, their big-budget summer signing, in goal, influenced at least two games, and there were other mistakes across the pitch.
Most worryingly, the recruitment continued to reinforce the feeling that Old Trafford has become a black hole. Mason Mount has been anonymous since arriving from Chelsea, Rasmus Hojlund hasn’t scored a Premier League goal, while Sofyan Amrabat looks lost as a midfield jack of all trades instead of being used in the No. 6 role that is his forte.
There is a reason every top club has a specialist recruitment team usually headed by a Director of Football. In the summer of 2017, Jurgen Klopp – who had sealed Champions League qualification for Liverpool in his first full season – wanted to reinforce the squad with Julian Brandt. He was overruled, and Liverpool brought in a certain Mohamed Salah from Roma instead. At the weekend, Salah scored his 200th goal for Liverpool.
Ten Hag was viewed as a saviour when he arrived, and given the sort of control over recruitment that his predecessors had. The astonishing £82 million pound outlay on Antony, the Brazilian winger who has never remotely looked like justifying that price tag, stands as a monument to United’s culture of waste. Across the M62, Liverpool rebuilt their midfield this past summer with the signings of Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister, Ryan Gravenberch and Wataru Endo. The total cost? Less than 150 million pounds.
For weeks and months, talk has been swirling around Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a lifelong fan, buying a stake in the club from the Glazer family, and taking over the football operations. OGC Nice, the club his INEOS group acquired in the summer of 2019, are currently second to Paris Saint-Germain in Ligue 1, but previous finishes of 5th, 9th, 5th and 9th are hardly the ringing endorsement that United fans will be looking for.
No matter what happens at Anfield – and surely some players will have a point to prove after the abject 3-0 humiliation at Bournemouth’s hands last Saturday – ten Hag is likely to stay in the job. Zinedine Zidane is the only top coach out of work right now, and it’s hard to see him accepting a task that could take years to complete.
Unai Emery’s Aston Villa and Andoni Iraola at Bournemouth have already shown the value of implementing a coherent playing philosophy and recruiting the players for that. With such a hotch-potch squad and tons of deadwood, United and Ten Hag are a million miles away from that. It could get worse before it gets better.
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