Should Ten Hag stick to developing emerging talent or look to recruit the finished articles?

fastwalker

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It is hard to know what Erik Ten Hag's approach will be to recruitment as Manchester United manager. We know that at Ajax, Ten Hag has operated on a completely different financial plane than United. There his approach, which he has deployed very effectively, has been to build successful teams through player development, not high profile recruitment. Clearly, however, the new manager will have a significant base budget to play with at United, with some estimates that it could be as high as £200m. Millions more are likely to be generated by player sales. Even with the likely lack of Champion's League football the sheer allure of United, the ability to pay high transfer fees and the offer of exorbitant wages will still prove a significant attraction to many players. But this is where it gets interesting because sometimes a cheque book can be a managers worst enemy. not their best friend. Let's not forget we have recruited Ten hag for doing what he is good at - his skill at achieving excellent results, playing modern football with moderate resources. We have not recruited him for doing what he has not proven to be good at - managing high profile players brough in on big transfer fees and earning massive wages.

Should Ten Hag instead resist the attempt to 'go big' in the transfer market and instead continue to do what has got him this far by recruiting hungry talent, with lots of head room for development. Players who know that they have to earn the right to play for the club, rather than those who think they have earned the right, because of the size of their transfer fee. We know that he has an eye for a player, look at Sebastian Haller as a case in point. A player totally underwhelming at West Ham, who has thrived under Ten Hag both in the Eredivisie and in the Champions League.

Is there a danger that with the pressure on Ten Hag to succeed and the expectation that player recruitment wows the fanbase, drives shirt sales and social media traffic that he may end up being lent on to bring in players with 'expectations to meet' and 'reputations to keep'?

Should Erik Ten Hag stick to getting the very best out of emerging talent or look to recruit the finished articles?
 

Cassidy

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Both
With a heavy focus on emerging talent
 

sullydnl

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Think someone (probably Rangnick) spoke about the virtues of targetting players on the first few contracts of their career rather than the last few? The idea being that you want someone who is effectively making a step up with his United contract and still has the biggest contract(s) of his career ahead of him here if he performs. Those virtues being both in terms of the player's motivation but also the efficiency/value of your transfer business. As opposed to signing players for whom their first United contract is the biggest and final payday of their career.

Personally, I'd like to see us make less mega-deals as it's simply far harder not to ultimately waste money in that price range. Looking at Liverpool's rebuild (which is the best recent model we have to follow), they only spent more than £50m on three players, VVD, Alisson and Keita. And of those three two have an argument for being the best in their position in the world. That's the sort of impact you should be looking for when you opt to spend that extra money over the many alternatives in a position that exist across Europe. Whereas our £50m+ transfers were Sancho, Maguire, Bruno, Fred, Lukaku, Pogba, and Di Maria. A lot of players who didn't justify the extra money over cheaper alternatives who would have been available if we had an efficient scouting process.

We have more financial fire-power than Liverpool did and should use it but I'd prefer to do so by speeding up the rebuild process and targetting more positions per summer rather than overpaying on the same few. But the bulk of those targets should be players who cost less than £50m and who arrive with something to prove.
 

Eddy_JukeZ

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I'd only recruit the finished article if it's a special player that can change the entire complexion of the squad(like RVP in 2012).

We should target more players whose best is likely ahead of them and not established players whose best is behind them.
 

Adisa

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He has said he has a preference for working with young talent, why change that?
 

JPRouve

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The way I see it, you should only target finished articles if you have identified an immediate need that can't be filled in a different way. Targetting finished articles as the base of your team building is otherwise foolish, you are not maximising your resources.
 

Crashoutcassius

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think the sentiment now is to recruit potential

a big shift in fans thinking from a few years ago when we lacked quality and experience and the fans wanted to add that

im not sure what the right approach is, but i would say we have no idea if ETH can manage big player personalities so that might push us one way or the other
 

AndySmith1990

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Focus on development of younger players but monitor the contact situation of established players who'd be a good fit for us. Look at some of the bargains and free transfers Juventus and Bayern have picked up in the past.
 

RedMilo

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Both without a doubt. You need good senior pro's in the dressing room to help guide younger talent, and show them the standards required to succeed. This was a major part of the problem - Moyes starting to change things too quickly, and LVG turned it upside down in terms of playing staff. After Carrick & Rooney retired, there was no one left to pass on the baton.

We need to get the spine of the team right - a good commanding goalkeeper, a strong leading centre half that can organise, a midfielder with energy, football awareness and vision, and a striker that can be a focal point of the attack. You can have all the Sancho's and Elanga's surrounding theses players but without them they aint going to develop into what we need as a team.

I'd go for Pope (Burnley), Torres (Villareal), Phillips (Leeds) & Kane (Spurs) as my transfer targets this season, if you can get them. We probably need to sign a second CM as well(Depends on keeping Garner or not), I'd push the boat out for Rice (West Ham) & Tielemans (Leicester) as well, but no way will we be able to to bring in 6 players without CL football.
 

Terranova

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I really don't know where this myth about Ten Hag and youth development is coming from. He is very hesitant to use youth players, the only ones that ended up sticking are because there were injuries (Dest, Mazraoui, Timber). Gravenberch was kinda forced upon him because it was the biggest talent of the academy. Ajax pretty much spent record amounts under Ten Hag. Buying a lot of players(even bench players) instead of going for youth players, because unlike OP claimed, Ajax is very rich relative for their size and can spend a lot of money on players, but luckily usually on younger players.

Players like De Ligt, De Jong, Van De Beek were already improving a lot before he came around and would continue to develop under any manager. Though i'm not saying Ten Hag didn't do a good job with young players, it's absolutely no where near people claim it is. He's ignoring the biggest talent in the academy for a year now, even though he is tearing up the Dutch version of the Championship, while a player like Kenneth Taylor, who is good enough for the first team, barely gets any minutes.
 

Invictus

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Ideally, ten Hag would steer clear of either extreme — unless the young talent is ridiculously good and a can't-miss type (like Rooney back in the day). For the most part, United needs to hit the sweet spot where the player has done emerging at the seller club (a painful process that puts a dent in competitiveness of the team), but isn't the finished article or a highly-paid megastar just yet (though not far off from a consistently productive level in an optimized environment). With that profile of player (typically in the 22—25 years old range), you avoid most of the developmental speedbumps, have a somewhat clear idea of what you are going to get because the track record is not to be sneezed at, and can extract the bulk of their peak (and crucially, retain the option of recouping some of your initial investment with a future sale as they approach their late 20s to early 30s and potentially become surplus to needs). Players like that should be the foundation of the team — and subsequently, you can sign finished articles to fill in the blanks over the short to medium term or carefully give chances to emerging talents (without asking them to sink or swim). Don't relish banging on about Liverpool and City (moooore than enough has been said and written about them), but credit where credit's due — both of those clubs have done a masterful job in this department in recent years (targeting the right profile of players wrt. technique and athleticism and mentality and age, and then putting them in positions of strength under a detail-oriented coach: like Salah at age 25, de Bruyne at age 24, Ederson at age 24, Mané at age 23, Robertson at age 23, Cancelo at age 25, Jota at age 23, Matip at age 25, Rodri at age 23, Fabinho at age 25, Dias at age 23 and so forth), whereas United's Starting XI has been a bit more polarized with quite a few inconsistent young-and-learnin' talents (most of these gambles haven't paid off till now) and over-the-hill acquisitions (relative to what they were at their peak).
 
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