There isn't a person on the forum that matches your description in your second paragraph, it was unanimously accepted that he wasn't the right man by the end. There were those that believed our problems ran deeper than just ETH though, who were vindicated quite emphatically given how things got even worse after he was sacked.
Erik ten Hag | 100k a day, who is the real loser, heh ?
- Thread starter Red Star One
- Start date
There isn't a person on the forum that matches your description in your second paragraph, it was unanimously accepted that he wasn't the right man by the end. There were those that believed our problems ran deeper than just ETH though, who were vindicated quite emphatically given how things got even worse after he was sacked.
Outrageous
Can we have a poll, mods?
More than half of the Caf voted to keep him after the second season and there were people who were defending him up to the day of his sacking.
And as this thread shows, some are still defending him.
All that we've really seen is that Amorim couldn't get more our of this squad than him.
We all get told off if we say it, but by now most other clubs would have come to the conclusion that a very bad manager followed a bad manager. Perhaps time might also show that to be the case here too.
By the end you mean after he was sacked. Because before that it most definitely wasn't the case. Which is how it usually goes. Fans defending the manager till the very end until he is sacked, only then are they willing to admit he in fact wasn't the right man for the job. Problems running deeper than the manager does not mean manager was doing his part well enough.
Those are the memeable headlines, with the reports going after all of the main criticisms leveled against him from his time at United, but there's obviously some scapegoating going on.
He was cut out of all the conversations involving sales and recruitment from the very start, they hired someone they never trusted enough to even inform him about transfers, and then set him up to fail by dismantling the squad he was expecting to work with. It isn't hard to see why he might have fallen out with them.
Then there's the report that he was recommending players from his own agency, which contradicts the reports that he was never involved in transfers.
It's just too convenient, the reports coming out of the club are almost perfectly designed to inflate existing narratives about him from his time at United, many of which were already exaggerated.
Having said that, it seems to be quite a successful approach from a PR perspective, as all the talk is about Ten Hag and none is about the many failings of the club.
You're conflating "not blaming him for literally everything" with "defending". A clearly fallacious argument.
Why did they fire him then?
I don't think this is accurate at all really, fan opinion seemed to mirror that of the management, as Ten Hag's position became untenable so did the perception of those defending him.
He wasn't good enough, but he was one part of an entirely failing machine.
Let me tell you as a United fan that is German, and as someone who is very critical of and surprised about the German media coverage of the sacking, the ruthlessness of which is no doubt based on sources from the club authorized to talk bad about the Ten Hag, or in the case of kicker, briefings from within the club.
But also as someone who wanted Ten Hag sacked from Utd way before he was actually sacked.
The German media coverage of the case, the hit pieces in kicker and the reports in BILD etc, has nothing whatsoever to do with an international audience, let alone the Utd fanbase, or clicks from Utd fans. Nothing.
Whatever Romano or tweeters with an eye to international clickers ('readers' is the wrong word) like Plettenberg then do with it is another case.
But the core of the reporting is completely detached from whatever we have been obsessing about as Utd fans. The world does not revolve around us.
As for the bolded, you've spelled it out yourself. He was hired to be the head coach, he tried to act as the manager and stepped on his superiors' toes in a way they deemed immediately sackable. He quite apparently wasn't able to read the room at all.
Last edited:
I don't think anyone is told of for suggesting that, more for ignoring the wider context that you're leaving out - the very bad squad, with bad attitudes, the bad financial situation due to bad spending and bad contracts for bad players, the bad facilities, etc.
We're starting to correct many of our long running problems now, maybe the manager will be another of those things this season, but we've still got work to do and it isn't as simple as replacing the manager to fix all our woes.
Anyway, the Amorim chat is off topic for this thread, I'm happy to continue it in a more appropriate thread if you want to reply to me in one of your choosing, but won't in this one to avoid derailing it.
It seems quite clearly that it's because their relationship had broken down (or never really existed to begin with).
I'm just pointing out that lumping the entirety of the blame for that on Ten Hag is really quite silly.
I’d argue it’s actually quite easy to believe them since they check out. Leverkusen not being chivalrous in attempting to hide these things doesn’t change the fact that a reference point exists
Besides, some of the German reports I skimmed through do say that normally Rolfes would be relaxing after the transfer window, but he’s under pressure now due to the massive cock-up. However; he’s preoccupied with getting the next appointment right, rather than optics and implied admissions of guilt with the course he’s taken.
It’s very well likely that Ten Hag is not as good as United fans wanted to believe, and got found out early elsewhere - despite some folks penning open letters that amassed thousands of signatures pleading for him to stay here
As a scapegoat. Maybe they missunderstood when he said he was a goat, serial winner, and so on, and had this plan of scapegoating him for their own faults from the beginning.
He didn't tank in the German league though, for the simple reason he wasn't able to keep the job long enough to compete in it. You said it yourself:
Where he tanked was in the very basic attempt to work in a structure where the DoF/sporting executive is the boss of the head coach/"manager". Which tells us he has not had the self awareness to analyse why he was a success at Ajax yet not so much a success at United.
I posted this around the time of his hiring. Most other German posters like @stefan92 predicted the same.
Last edited:
I think it's very naïve to suggest that the reporting, which is clearly designed to deflect blame from the Leverkusen management, didn't take in to account Ten Hag's previous reputation when creating the hit pieces as you call them.
It isn't for United fans, but they could clearly be relied upon to corroborate the accusations and boost the message.
As for your summary, it's not entirely accurate. He was hired to be head coach of a squad that was then dismantled without his knowing. No wonder he didn't take that well. He should have handled it better, but then so should his superiors. It's a case of failings all round, rather than just Ten Hag coming in like a wrecking ball from the start.
That's not how I remember it. Pogba had already left, and Martial was finished due to his injuries. Greenwood was rightly despised for his actions. Rashford was coming off 18 months of poor form and injuries. There were loads of questions about Sancho's suitability for the PL. Ronaldo was seen as a disruptive influence. Bruno lost some of his goodwill in the 21/22 season.
Ten Hag and Murtough made a mess of rebuilding the squad, but it was in terrible shape after Ole and Rangnick's season.
No it isn't. Ten Hag's reputation in Germany was fine, because what happened at United was not followed that closely in Germany, at least in the cosmos of the usual kicker or BILD reader. Ten Hag was a known name equally for his successes at Ajax and floating around as a potential name to coach in the Bundesliga from that time. Again, the world does not revolve around us.
And the squad was not dismantled without his knowing, when every German football fan knew the squad would be dismantled. He can't have been that ignorant. Again he refused to read the room, which means both the club completely misjudged his ability or willingness to fit into their hierarchy and he completely misjudged the amount of authority he would be granted.
He got fired after he lost the confidence of every single person within the club. That's tanking in my books. It's one thing doing well at a big club in a semi professional level were even De Boer could win titles there and its another doing it in a decent league. If ETH can't work in a structure where the DOF/Sporting director has control over what's going on then he's in the wrong sport. That's how football is run these days. Lets face it though. He had that control with us and he saddles us with rubbish players with Eredivisie experience turning us into a bit of a joke. Everyone was asking whether we had reverted to speaking Dutch at the club.
It's only easy to believe if it's confirming existing biases. The reports are clear that the results aren't why he was sacked, given that there aren't enough of them to judge.
He's a difficult guy to get along with, that's clear from his time here and there, but surely you have to accept that there were failings on the Leverkusen side here too.
Who put all the blame on him? I have yet to read a single post putting the blame solely on him. Leverkusen received plenty criticism. It could be more in my opinion, but I haven’t read from anyone that they don’t share part of the blame for this farce.
The post I have quoted still shows that you don’t quite understand how clubs like Leverkusen, or most clubs in general are being run, especially regarding transfers. At least that’s the only explanation I have for your claim, that he was cut out of all conversations regarding transfers from the start, thus he could never have suggested players from his agency.
That the manager, or coach in this case, isn’t the main responsible person for transfers, doesn’t mean they get cut out of the process. They usually, or basically always, have the right to give input. They get asked, what they need and who they might want. But they aren’t the ones making the deals. So Leverkusen being pissed at him for suggesting those players is in no way illogical. These things happen all the time. They have happened multiple times at Bayern, for example, over the years.
They also didn’t set him up for anything. Why in the world would they do that? Out of spite for a man they had just hired? That makes no sense at all. ETH knew that there would be a major squad turnover before he signed. Now I do agree with most people, that the turnover was too extreme and should have been handled differently. But that’s not setting him up for failure.
And you completely ignore the possibility that ten Hag and his issues led to players wanting out. Because that’s exactly what’s been rumoured the second Xhaka suddenly decided to leave at all cost. And many rumours point to Hincapie being a similar case.
Your posts read to me like you want some of these things to be wrong, because the opposite would mean that United allowed him to get away with shit like this. Which is, looking at his time at your club, entirely plausible.
The dude clearly fecked up in a gigantic way. He alienated everyone at the club in the shortest possible time. He behaved arrogant, stubborn and argued with his superiors over the media from the very start. He publicly shifted blame from his own actions to others from the start. With everything we saw, it’s very clear, that he did a horrible job, overreached his competences and would have most likely gotten sacked earlier, if the optics of that wouldn’t have been so bad. From having followed the whole saga from the beginning, it is clear to me that the articles are mostly right. They will be exaggerated here and there. But the claims are so consistently spread over multiple publications, some with good relations to Leverkusen, others with not so good ones, that I believe them. And the biggest point is, that even though his sacking is now a few days in the past, absolutely no one is coming to his defense at all. Nobody. I have never seen anything like that happen. And that’s extremely telling.
Last edited:
I think you've been completely missing the point. The DoF/head coach structure isn't a matter of leagues or their level. It's only Utd who struggle with this problem due to our history. And calling the Dutch league "semi professional" is just plain idiotic, sorry.
They clearly can’t, as this thread shows. And it’s absurd to think that Leverkusen would plan a coordinated social media attack against their former coach, counting on support of fans from his former club. Why would the even need to do that? They have their own fans for that.
United fans and their worship of managers could probably be classified as a new diagnosis in the DSM-6
So what happened at United didn't affect his reputation, but what happened at Ajax did? That's quite difficult to believe. You're relying heavily on the "world revolves around us" straw man you've built, but that hasn't ever been my argument.
And your second paragraph is faulty logic, as the dismantling was clearly of a scope beyond what he was led to believe.
Let me put it to you this way, do you believe the Leverkusen management should take any blame here, or is this entirely on Ten Hag?
It's mind boggling isn't it? Couldn't believe it myself when I came in here yesterday... Hence my post about it as well.
The guy is one of our worst managers ever, trophies or no. The way he set us back probably multiple years financially and having to clean up his mess with players and wages. Probably other stuff as well.
I think you're somewhat missing my point. There's absolutely no room in the United fans mindset for a manager to fail because they're not a very good manager in their own right. If they fail it's because they were set up for failure, because the players weren't very good, because they weren't backed, because the stars didn't align and begrudgingly, right at the end, because maybe the manager themselves wasn't very good. In fact, you've listed all of the excuses yourself.
Ten Hag is a fantastic example of this. The more money he got to spend replacing the not very good squad, the worse we got. Solskjaer finished 2nd and 3rd with his not very good squad, Rangnick (yes him) finished 6th with it with the exact same number of points that ten Hag snuck third a year later.
He then took us to 8th and got sacked next season for being worse than that having spent hundreds of millions getting the players that would make his football work only for Amorim to come in and perform even worse with the new not very good squad and need to spend £200m to make it perform better than literally relegation form.
We can all agree with that not every manager is good enough to manage Manchester United. One plausible explanation for our results and trend would therefore be that ten Hag might not be as good a manager as Solskjaer and Amorim might not be as good as ten Hag. The idea that maybe the managers aren't very good is certainly supported by all of them going around the world in their post United careers failing at every club they go to.
Perhaps rather than the club being in constant crisis always having shit players and always needing to rebuild we should take the possibility seriously that when a manager shows signs they are not cut out for it we should cut our loses early rather than late, not as early as Leverkusen here, but earlier than in the third season.
Last edited:
There are a lot of straw men in this post, and you're contradicting yourself too. You claim to believe the reports, but you're contradicting the ones that clearly state that he never had a say in transfers at all. So it isn't me not knowing how clubs are run (I agree with your summary of how things usually work), rather it's you claiming to believe the reports yet conveniently ignoring the bits that don't add up.
Anyway I'm currently sat in the sun in Venice, I have little interest spending my time replying to posts that are so full of bad faith arguments and attempts at belittlement, so I won't be replying to you further.
Leverkusen will just move on and soon forget this mis-step (just imagine they hire Thiago Motta to double down...), Ten Hag is left with the dork or even damaged good label that will make extremely difficult for him to get a job elsewhere in a top 5 league. People suggesting lower Serie A clubs would take a punt do not know what they are talking about, really.
Last sentence first: Of course they should. I've posted that I think their public campaign against Ten Hag is unprofessional and I actually called it indecent. I was also baffled how eagerly and unquestioningly kicker let themselves be used as mouthpieces for the Leverkusen management.
They also clearly must have made major mistakes in either vetting or negotiating in the hiring. They, as opposed to the German public, must have known his insistence to be involved in hirings and even the problematic way of involving his own agent from his time at United.
Notwithstanding that, they are well within their rights to sack him as early as they can if the clashes turned out so virulent.
Second sentence, obviously I don't know what he was led to believe. But here is what I posted about Leverkusen in May
https://www.redcafe.net/threads/eri...e-real-loser-heh.485308/page-27#post-33278616
I'm not an insider, if I knew it would happen anyone should know, let alone Ten Hag.
Now to the first point: of course Ten Hag's lack of success at Utd will have been registered in Germany.
But, and this is where the "world revolves" point comes in: what do you think the outside perception of United's last 10 years is abroad, from the outside?
Do you actually think the German casual football fan follows the minutiae, and puts the blame on every single individual we hire, like we do?
Do you think the German public goes,
"Oh, Moyes failed, didn't have the stature.
Angel Di Maria, coward.
Martial, lazy bum.
Van Gaal failed, over the hill boring dinosaur.
Schweinsteiger, completely over it.
Oh, now Mourinho is sacked, terrible manager.
Pogba, fraud, bad attitude
Mkhitaryan, only could shine in a farmer's league.
Lukaku, donkey.
Alexis Sanchez, lazy, fraud.
Solskjaer, just a PE teacher!
Sancho, overrated fraud.
Ten Hag, nothing but a bald fraud, horrible hiring. [...]"
You think they see us hiring manager after manager, and big money transfer after big money transfer, and register every one of these managers' and players' reputation as destroyed?
Nope, they register merely episodes of a club that is struggling. The reputation that is affected is mainly ours, not so much that of the people that come to our club and fail. Because all those people have careers apart from their failures at Utd, and these parts of their careers have also been registered.
It's only us who don't see the forest for the trees.
Last edited:
Yes, but there was no anti-EtH bias in Germany. However there is a strong pro-Leverkusen bias because their board earned a reputation as doing the right stuff. If they claim they made a mistake and try to fix it people believe that.
But that is completely unrelated to EtH being the mistake. It would have been the same if they had signed someone else and it went the same way.
United has a reputation of being an uncoachable mess of a club. It's a free hit for any manager. Similarly to Hamburg was for many years, nobody blamed a coach for failing there.
So if at all it was positively noticed that EtH won something at all.
Can you link me a German article that clearly states he can’t even make recommendations regarding transfers?
Sure maybe to start with, but the fact is that all of these managers are going on to have post United careers and failing in these too.
If there was a track record of managers leaving United going on and doing well, then, yes, their time here would be irrelevant, but as his instant sacking at Leverkusen shows they are paying attention to what happened here, which is why they moved to get rid of him so quickly when personality traits he exhibited here came up there too. If he'd turned up there and behaved the same way straight off the back of Ajax he would have had a far longer rope.
ETH seem to struggle with it as well as he was sacked at Leverkusen at a ridiculous league. Regarding the Dutch league, I am old enough to remember Van Basten, Gullit and Rijkaard. They were exceptional players, the cream of the crop. Yet those days are long over. The last time a Dutch side won the CL was back in 94-95. The last top Dutch manager was LVG. There's a very good reason for that. The Dutch league has been in decline for decades and its been in the pits for quite some time.
The PL was literally won by a Dutch manager last season, but never mind.
You're still looking at things through a lens that is too manager centric. Ten Hag didn't spend millions, it was Murtough, followed by Ashworth. We relied on ETH to identify targets, but that's because the club was incapable of doing it. Fortunately that's an issue that's been addressed now.
Ten Hag was deservedly sacked because his approach left us wide open to opposition attacks constantly, and he consistently underestimated the physical requirements of the Premier League, and overestimated his players (at one point he said that Antony was one of the fastest players over 10 yards, which was nonsense). This was recognised by almost every United fan by the time he was sacked, it's just that some recognised that we had much deeper personnel problems that still needed fixing. Those fixes are still ongoing, it'll likely take another 2 summers to address them.
Anyway this has been done to death by now, I only posted in here too point out that the Leverkusen management screwed up by appointing a head coach they didn't trust in the first place.
This is almost exactly what I was trying to get across with my posts on the topic, sounds like we were in violent agreement.
Yes and that's my point, by the time he had been sacked it had been evident for three years.
My precise issue is that we are not manager centric at all, ever. We all see the same shit with the same managers and blame the players for it time after time until the point where it's so unbelievably obvious there's no other possible explanation.
Just once I'm asking us to entertain the possibility... maybe these guys just weren't up to it?
The closest we got to that was Moyes, and that was back when we still had standards.
Leverkusen obviously fecked up appointing him, but at the other extreme after two years we were still losing football matches in the exact same way we did in ten Hag's first two games in charge, and we still had a big chunk of people blaming everyone other than him. Perhaps there is a middle ground to be found between the two extremes which allows for managers simply to be not very good.