Manchester United lost at West Ham, 2-1, on Sunday. After equalizing in the 81st minute, the visitors conceded a penalty in the second minute of stoppage time, which Jarrod Bowen converted for the winner. The loss dropped the miserable Red Devils to 14th in the Premier League table, with 11 points in nine matches. Only two clubs in the league have scored fewer goals than United's measly eight. On Monday the club announced the dismissal of manager Erik ten Hag, which, well, that makes sense.
In 2022-23, his first full season with the club, Ten Hag led the Red Devils to a League Cup title and a return to Champions League qualification; perhaps just as impressively, he ran off Cristiano Ronaldo and seemed to rejuvenate a moribund Marcus Rashford, who scored 30 goals in all competitions. It's been a steep and largely uninterrupted fall since then. Last season United plunged to an eighth-place finish, its lowest since the advent of the Premier League, and squandered that UCL berth, finishing dead last in Group A with four points from six matches and even missing out on the Europa League fallback spot. Rashford regressed; Ten Hag picked a stupid fight with winger Jadon Sancho and banished him from the squad; the Brazilian winger Antony, one of Ten Hag's flagship additions, performed abysmally on the field while also facing horrifying domestic violence accusations from an ex-girlfriend and two others.
An FA Cup title—surely not a trophy shiny enough to blind a club of United's stature from the underlying rot—kept Ten Hag in the job over the summer; he even got a new contract out of it. But he's had a sword over his neck the entire time. Each successive lackluster week of this season only steepened the scale of impossible turnaround he'd need in order to save himself. The closest thing to an inspiring result United has produced in this campaign was a mid-September 3-0 league win over dogmeat relegation-bound Southampton (7-0 over friggin' Barnley in the League Cup three days later doesn't even count). The most surprising thing United's done all season was not replacing Ten Hag during the October international break; firing him 10 days after the resumption of league play only compounds the silliness.
The hire never made much sense in the first place, and looks all the worse in retrospect. The club ported Ten Hag over from Ajax with the promise that he'd update United's retrograde play, a lengthy renovation project even if it proceeded smoothly—which projects simply do not do at Manchester United. The club doesn't produce homegrown players suited to the high-pressing, all-action style with which Ten Hag made his name, and changes to its academy and player development systems would take years to deliver. In the meantime, every sector of the squad needed, and still generally needs, a near-total overhaul. Under what circumstances would any manager get that much time, and under what circumstances could he hope to sustain the necessary level of power within a club in profound organizational disarray? He'd have to be winning league titles to do it, and Ten Hag never had a squad halfway good enough for that.
Bad luck didn't help. Key signings—Lisandro Martínez, Leny Yoro, Mason Mount—went pretty much directly from the airport to the injured list. Mainstay Luke Shaw has been out with a calf injury all season. Casemiro, brought over from Real Madrid in summer of 2022 to give United some seriousness in the middle of the park, missed a big chunk of the 2023-24 season, returned as a shell of himself, and has been dreadful ever since. None of these players, nor all of them together, were going to restore Manchester United to greatness—but you can't move on from Harry Maguire while also existentially dependent on his availability.
Ruud van Nistelrooy, who joined Ten Hag's staff as assistant manager back in July, will now serve as Ten Hag's replacement, at least on an interim basis. He had some success as manager with PSV in the Dutch Eredivisie, winning a couple cup trophies in 2022 and '23. Don't sign any long-term leases, Ruud!
