Funny thing is, if this proper structure was in place, ETH would have been long gone already by now.
Erik ten Hag - Manchester United manager
- Thread starter sewey89
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And which Bayern managers won the CL? It wasn’t Pep. They don’t need Pep to win trophies anymore then United should need an amazing manager.
You being unable to get it is tiring.
Or maybe things wouldn’t be as bad as they are and he’d be doing well
Hypothical scenarios are not factual because you think something
Don’t let facts get in the way of a good worship. In the same thread, a couple of days ago someone claimed that he won manager of the year last season despite that he was not even one of the six managers nominated for that award.
The difference is that Bayern has standards for their managers and don't take excuses from them. Bayern really messed up their summer transfer window in regard to their defence and when Tuchel publicly complained their CEO just stated "it's his job to find solutions" and that was it. Tuchel did find solutions (converting Goretzka into a CB and switching to a deeper setup to protect the defence better) and had one of the strongest first half season performances ever. If he didn't, his job would be in danger.
EtH constantly whining about injuries etc wouldn't fly with Bayern's board.
Bayern do have standards throughout the club that isn’t just expecting a manager to do well. They don’t just hire and fire managers and need squad rebuilds with every new manager.
A Bayern manager doesn’t just get 400 million spent and that’s expected to work.
You can’t set standard’s of excellence if you don’t have standards of excellence in the club.
Bayern don’t need an amazing manager because they are well run, not simply because they sack managers quicker.
Yes, things would be much better if only he wasn't allowed to pick his own signings and someone else did it for him. Then he'd be able to coach the players properly, even though he can't even coach his own signings.
Somehow now the argument is whether United really need a good manager
I didn’t say things would be better. You cant even read posts. Like I said, stop arguing things you aren’t even understanding correctly.Yes, things would be much better if only he wasn't allowed to pick his own signings and someone else did it for him. Then he'd be able to coach the players properly, even though he can't even coach his own signings.
Somehow now the argument is whether United really need a good manager
I would also argue that they benefit from the Bundesliga maybe having one real challenger a season, which means if they miss on a transfer they usually have enough to get by.
Oh, right. You said "maybe". Might as well not say anything then.
That is a factor most definitely.
But strength of EPL does not explain how poor a return we have been getting. Managers do not explain why we have been getting such a poor return for a decade.
Uniteds wages and transfer spending is so far ahead of most clubs in England , the strength of the league doesn’t explain our miserable struggles. Statistically we should have even fluked a league or CL at this stage.
The “cult of manager” as I see it , is people focusing and believing that some next level manager is gonna come in and make it all click. There’s so many problems with this , not least we have the same issues when they leave, that’s of course assuming we can find these hen teeth managers.
You look at Chelsea under Roman or Bayern or other top clubs. They don’t rely on sacking managers and it doesn’t leave their clubs in turmoil. They don’t have the same rebuild requirements that we do and can recover quickly from a bad season.
That’s how United would be if we were well run because that’s how it goes at every super club. Regardless of manager; we should be complaining that we aren’t challenging for the league or CL. We can’t even consistently qualify for the CL. For me, that level of failure is well beyond managers.
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Ah, you are catching on. Not being sure on something allows people to not go head first into arguments looking to prove a point. I’m not interested in proving you wrong because the manager discussion is subjective.
You are coming at this from an angle of ETH is a failure, anything else is nonsense. I’m saying I don’t know how we factor in the stuff that’s going on at United. That doesn’t mean his record this season is fine. You and others don’t seem to be getting it because you are so angry and just want him gone.
The season SAF fell out with magnier we finished 3rd after winning the league. We finalished 3rd the next season. Ferguson finished 3rd spot 3 times between 1992 and 2013 and 2 of them coincided with ownership issues.
Does that mean ownership question marks make it ok for managers to have bad seasons or explains it? Nope, there were other factors , including Chelsea poaching our transger shopping list but it suggests it could unsettle things and affect even one of the worlds greatest managers, a league winning squad squad and their plans.
The injuries situation is difficult to quantify but it seems to be a footnote for some of you. I can’t remember ever having this many injuries, so I don’t understand how people are so confident that it’s not really relevant.
If you were a player at United. Regardless of manager
- your own future is unclear
- club future is unclear,
- injuries mean you won’t be realistically challanging for anything
- your squad is probably getting some of these injuries due to the gruelling season
- the club having zero money and offering Weghorst/reguillon level solutions wouldn’t exactly warm the cockles
- the club seems to have continual dramas with players , ronaldo , Anthony , greenwood, Sancho
- you will know that the best teams have the most consistent lineups and we can’t have that this aesson
- you will know that many fans and pundits and media won’t factor in anything other then results
- the teams you are competing against May have some of these issues but not them all at the same time
And when we get to the manager , you don’t know if he will be sacked when the new owners or INEOs takes over. And let’s not forget United hasn’t been a league or CL winning team in over a decade, this is happening at a club that has form of squad dysfunction and under performing. We can’t fall back on Bayern or other top club recoveries so I’m not sure how confident players would be about that.
Whatever any manager is doing on the training pitch or tactics they choose, all these other things are handicaps and at best not helpful.
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I'm not angry that ETH has not been sacked, I don't know where you're getting that from.
You keep telling others they don't understand things they are arguing and yet you think you've uncovered some unknown truth by saying United is badly run and failure is beyond just managers.
Nobody is disputing that and you're making it sound like we're blaming ETH and other managers for not challenging for the title or winning the CL. Acting as if there's nothing between those expectations and the awful mess we're in right now. We could literally be in relegation zone and these exact same excuses would still be just as valid or not valid.
At some point surely you have to ask yourself if this is yet another bad appointment that further exacerbates the issue. So far everything points to ETH more likely being De Boer 2.0 than a Klopp. If the truth is anything close to the former, if you're a big club you want to get rid regardless of the other issues still present at the club. We've made so many bad signings in the last 10 years, I don't know why would it be so hard to believe our managerial appointments have been mostly bad as well.
Also, statistically we absolutely should not have fluked a CL by now, that's absolute madness. How long it took SAF to win it and how badly he wanted it. Even the league is something you hardly fluke. Leicester happens once in 1000 years.
He has everything to prove today. Interested to see what happens. Feels like such a massive game.
The criteria by which United has failed is that they haven't won the league or CL, as they've won the domestic cups and Europa League. If a top club hires a half-decent manager and they don't win the league or CL, then they've failed just as much as United managers have failed, no?
If you mean other things like "not qualifying for the CL", that has happened at Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, and Spurs.
Sir Alex did not take over a super club, he left us as a super club. Super clubs don’t go 11 years without a major trophy. Major clubs don’t need unbelievable managers to win trophies.
Thanks for elaborating.
I feel like our managerial appointments are related to the dysfunction of the club. I’m not saying the managers were or were not good enough, I’m saying there hasn’t really been a cohesive plan so it’s hard to say.
We really shouldn’t need complete squad rebuilds when we change managers. That’s because the club hasn’t really had a clear strategy.
I don’t think managers should choose signings but they should be involved in the process. I don’t believe all our transfer signings were down to managers. If Klopp was at United, he would have signed Brandt over salah, but Pool have a transfer board structure to overseee and challange even Klopp. That’s the way it should be, for it not to be is a club problem
This is part of the reason I don’t have a go at ETH for transfers. He shouldn’t be making the decision on his own. The club didn’t need to agree to his terms but once again our club makes a wrong decision because we don’t have any pedigree at transfers. ETH was not as involved in signings at Ajax, some say it’s because Ajax have the kind of football setup we really should be having.
This seasons results and performances are not good enough. If ETH is sacked because INEOs have a specific plan I’d get that. I’d still feel sorry for ETH but I’m excited to see what they do differently.
I don’t see those clubs as our equal. Uniteds size and spending is more comparable with city , Bayern , Madrid and Barca.
None of them suffer a decade of the kind we are having. A poor sesson for them is not winning the league or CL. That’s a super club.
Now the EPL being a strong league does make it harder , no doubt. But I don’t see why it means United need entire squad rebuilds when we change managers like no other team in the world. If we changed managers more often it could be even more chaotic squad changes! But that’s a club thing, we’ve no direction or planning when it comes to the squad, changing managers shouldn’t be so disruptive.
I don’t believe it means that “bad managers” are why we only finish in top 4 in league every 2 seasons.
I’m more excited about what the potential of what INEOs are gonna do regardless of ETH. Given our resources, I don’t believe we need an amazing manager to bring back success.
Why would anyone feel sorry for ETH? He’s out his depth and clueless. lets see who plays football today. We may get a result but we are terrible to watch and directionless as a team. That’s down to an inept manager. He is not getting the best out of his team. He’s spending has been worse than his tactics. He won’t be here next season.
Whilst I really don’t want to see United fans at each other’s throats, there is so much merit in your post. United are not a small club and must act like an elite club therefore if any manager loses 50% of his games by the start of the new year, he must be removed. Twenty five to thirty games is more than enough as a sample this season United have played - 29 Won - 13 Drawn 2 Lost 14 that’s simply not acceptable in any season for this club.
Whatever period the club is in, it remains one of the true elite clubs in world football and as such should be in the top 3 or 4 every season, even a 5th or 6th place position could be tolerated if the club secured 70 points. The following rules should apply to all United Managers;
1. Lose over 30% of your PL games you get sacked
2. Spend money on poor players not suitable for the PL that become depreciating assets like Antony, Mallacia, Mount and onana you get sacked - Your losing the club money which means you as a manager are no longer an asset.
3. Not qualifying for Europe in any
Competition after Xmas - instant Sack
4. Negative Goal difference in any season after 19 league games(Half a season) you should be sacked
5. Losing by huge margins to Rivals on multiple occasions - you should be sacked
6. Losing over 40% of games at old Trafford in any season you should be sacked.
7. Not understanding the strength of the PL and under valuing and selling players from your youth development like Antony Elanga, Andreas Pereira, Dean Henderson, James Garner, Zidane Iqbal, Marcos Jurado, Charlie Savage, Mateo Kovar. The club received £60m for all of these and within a year they will be worth more like £170-180m.
8. Show any form of favouritism or nepotism in selecting players and buying players by using Agents connected to their family - if this is proven where players do not get a fair chance whilst the team is seriously underperforming on the pitch - you should be sacked.
To Summarise, ETH is already on serious thin ice and should he lose to Spurs today, or even a draw might be his last visit to the old Trafford dug out.
I am not sure where I said anything about manager needing to be protected or above the club.
When I said proper structure to improve our fortunes, who do you think I meant by our fortunes? The clubs/fans.
I don't understand where I said INEOS working for the manager? I don't get most of your post.
Let me repeat myself. I am hoping INEOS sets up a proper footballing structure, with DOF, head of recruitment etc. Also just having them incharge helps a lot as their focus is footballing success. Once that's set up, the manager who they hire will be in a better position to succeed, and if that guy doesn't, they'll move on to the next guy. But that set up is much better than what we've had for last 10 yrs.
With the exception of City all those clubs leagues are a closed shop pretty much, look at La Liga for instance I don't think a team below the top 3 made a transfer over 20 million last summer, Bayern have won the league x10 in a row, English football has never been this way in the 80's and into the 90's Liverpool were the biggest club in England winning EC and leagues for fun then they went 30 years without winning the league so it does happen here, the only thing our fans can't accept that it's happening and want to compare with clubs in totally different league and circumstances and say well it would never happen to Madrid yeah well it wouldn't because their league isn't set up for it to happen to them.
You are right that the PL has much more strong teams than the other leagues. Still the downside of that is that in those other leagues managers are sometimes sacked/let go even when they win titles. It's a very rare exception when that happens in England (the only case I can think of actually is LvG at United, but I might not be aware/just forgetting someone).
Just think of last season when Bayern sacked Nagelsmann while being in the race for a treble because they did believe they had a better chance to actually win it with Tuchel. In hindsight it at least hasn't helped but that's the kind of cut-throat standards they apply. For United it would just be enough for now if they would take consequence AFTER exiting importing cups prematurely (looking at the CL group exit).
You, and many others, are very wrong in this. If there was a proper structure in place, Ten Hag either wouldn't be signed as a manager in the first place (because the team absolutely doesn't fit his style of play, and that's super visible from the start), or they would've backed him with signings that would fit his style of play, for the positions they need signings. Expecting a manager to make DoF decisions is stupid, thinking all these signings were 100% the idea of ten Hag is another mistake in thinking.
People who say Ten Hag paid 90 million for Antony and therefore needs to be removed honestly don't know how football clubs are run.
He probably said he'd like Antony, then people higher up pay big money for him, leaving him no money to address other important positions.
So City are the benchmark for us then as they are the closest to United in terms of resources and size. They won the league with pelligrini and Mancini. There is no reason United should not be able to win leagues with those level managers. Teams weren’t falling over themselves to get these managers so it’s not like they are next level managers.
But even at that, we aren’t talking about a super club who aren’t winning leagues or CLs, we can’t even consistently qualify for the CL. The strength of the EPL doesn’t explain that.
I’m not excusing the manager in any way, I’m just pointing out how crucial it is to get your recruitment right in the PL, on top of having a good footballing structure, being lucky with injuries etc.
Rashford is bang average but has been built up by the media to be some sort of Messi-like talent because he's English. Apart from one decent season, his career has followed a pattern of two or three good games followed by ten anonymous ones. Apart from one more consistent season in 22/23 he's averaged less than 10 goals a season across all league, domestic cups and European games in 9 years. Rashford is a striker who has never scored 20 goals in a season in the league. And this is his 9th season. Most strikers of that calibre in other clubs are on 30K per week not 300K as this prima donna is on. Man Utd giving him a 300k per week contract off the back of that tells you everything about why we are where we are now.
Fergie had a good first full season (1987-88) and got United up to second, only for the team to slump into mid-table the following year and be even worse in 1989-90. Many Utd fans wanted him sacked. Others saw that this was the wrong idea. They saw there were deeper issues then, as now - the inadequate youth system, bad elements in the players' culture and all sorts of uncertainty over the future ownership of the club. Fergie came under huge pressure in so many ways Ten Hag will be familiar with now. The team lacked any style (it wasn't fashionable to talk about 'identity' back then because hipsters hadn't been invented yet). Terrible results included losing 5-1 to City when they were the real city, not some Arab toy, and going 11 games without a league win. Team selections were often heavily criticized and it turned toxic when Fergie left Mark Hughes on the bench and United surrendered a 1-0 lead to lose 2-1 at home to a Crystal Palace team who had just lost 9-0 at Anfield. The atmosphere got even worse that day when someone pulled out a big banner saying "three years of excuses and we're still crap. Ta ra Fergie". He got dragged out by stewards and it got really ugly. In the midst of all this, there were no early trophies like Ten Hag, no cup finals. But there was plenty of speculation. Press criticism was relentless. Every pundit and ex-player opened their mouths and turned on the verbal sewer pipes, just like now. Many argued just because Fergie had done it in a 'lesser' league with Aberdeen was no reason to think he could cut it in England. Sound familiar? Yet amid all that, United persisted with him. It was the bravest decision. They could have just been totally reactionary, just as the club has been the last few years, and fired him. The parallels are all there. The lessons are all there. The question is, does anyone in the club hierarchy have the brains to see this? Will Sir Jim bring in someone with such brains?
If a proper structure was in place, Ole wouldn't have got the job, Jose wouldnt take over after LVG because of contrasting play styles.
If a proper structure was in place, we wouldn't have signed Maguire, AwB, Sancho, Casemiro, Antony and Mount.
Means, our proper structure would have invested those money in better players and we would have been in a better position now.
So please stop this nonsense that our problems started this season.
Yes, ETH is the new SAF
Not Necessarily, but he deserves a chance to build anew. We have been awful since the great man retired and it will take some time to get rebuiltYes, ETH is the new SAF
As the evidence of SAF example proves, any manager will turn out great if they are given a lot of time. Moyes would be winning trebles now if we had only trusted him.Yes, ETH is the new SAF
He doesn’t really ‘deserve’ a chance though. He may earn it but he doesn’t deserve it by the sole virtue of existence.
Right. Ludicrous logic, isn't it? Imagine having the privilege of living through SAF's tenure at United and at the very end, coming to the conclusion that the only thing that made him special was the time he was given.
What also gets overlooked in ETH v SAF comparisons is that SAF was 44 when he came here, on the back of a Cup Winners Cup win with Aberdeen (the magnitude of that achievement seems to get overlooked) and having just won Scottish league titles breaking Old Firm domination (which is NOT the equivalent of winning Eredivisie with Ajax). His resume was much stronger and he was also 10 years younger so even though he took time to rebuild us as a club, he was still young when he got to a point where we were at the level we had aspired to be at.
If we are happy to give ETH a free pass for the next 5-6 season he will be 60 by the time we are competitive, so we will likely be looking for a new manager soon enough anyway.
If we are happy to give ETH a free pass for the next 5-6 season he will be 60 by the time we are competitive, so we will likely be looking for a new manager soon enough anyway.
One thing i will say in his favor is that we wanted someone to change the culture in the dressing room and even if it perhaps hasn't been a total success so far the booting of Ronaldo and Sancho demonstrates he is trying. For the life of me i can't understand even a few people siding with Sancho. He also gave both of them chances to turn it around.
I don’t know why you’ve typed that up in response to me. Did you quote the wrong post by any chance? I re-read my post and I’m speaking about the assertions made on this thread on/about his character. I mentioned him carrying United last season, because he did, and that was to highlight that the notion that he doesn’t care - doesn’t make much sense to me.
I very much doubt a Mancunian Manchester United fan, academy graduate, that has been at the club for 20 years, doesn’t care about United/is a bad egg etc etc. Rashford is as close to “Mr. Manchester United” as you can possibly get.
Lastly, I disagree that he’s been hyped up to be a Messi level talent, and I’ve also not seen any indication that he’s a prima donna - I’d argue otherwise in fact. He’s also not a “striker”.
I do have issues with the lack of consistency in his performances and his potential suitability for a title chasing team due to said lack of consistency - but again, I wasn’t talking about that.
Whether ETH should stay or not depends on if he will give up control over transfers. If he doesn't then kick him out the door once season ends. If he does then let him stay, he's a good manager. Just clueless with transfers and squad building.
I agree with this. He can have a say like most managers do but excessive control is never the way to go. I don't think hel get that anywhere to be honest so I expect him to be reasonable on it. If he's not then he'd be pretty silly.
That shouldn't even be a factor. He's proven to be not fit for the job through his own stubborness and insanity.
Fait to say ten hags job is on the line today? Not that he'd be sacked if we lose, but even a vaguley competitive top 4 challenge could well end with a loss. Reputationally it would be very hard to return from yet another defeat to a 'big' team, especially at home, and especially one who lost its captain and manager last summer.