Already, it feels, we have reached the stage of the cycle at which Erik ten Hag is being discussed in historical terms. The precise details have ceased to matter – where did Raphaël Varane disappear to in the autumn? What’s Bruno Fernandes really upset about? How can André Onana, a goalkeeper who specialises in pushing up behind a high line, so often be caught too deep? Does anybody remember Jadon Sancho? – and Manchester United’s manager has become just another chapter in the increasingly lengthy post‑Ferguson malaise.
Ten Hag is the 25th manager in United’s history. He looks almost certain to be the 22nd to have failed to win the league. Perhaps Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s purchase of a quarter of the club, assuming it is eventually completed, will spark a remarkable turnaround and Ten Hag can join Ernest Mangnall, Sir Alex Ferguson and Sir Matt Busby as a league champion, but it doesn’t seem likely any time soon – and the indications are Ratcliffe is already considering replacements. It may not be much consolation, either to him or United, but Ten Hag is far from alone in finding the club beyond his horsemanship.
United have won more league titles than any other English side but their history is characterised by long periods of frustration and failure. Forty-one years (31 seasons thanks to the two world wars) passed between Mangnall’s last league title and Busby’s first, and 26 years between Busby’s last and Ferguson’s first. They are now in their third great drought: the counter since Ferguson’s last will surely tick over to 11 years in the summer and seems likely to go much higher than that – and despite the financial stratification of modern football that sustains them almost inevitably in the top half of the Premier League.
But it’s the contrast with Liverpool, whom they face at Anfield on Sunday, that perhaps casts the cruellest light on United’s struggles. The second-most successful side in England have also known their periods in the wilderness. They have won one league title in 33 years – which, allied to United’s decade of failure, might suggest English football is in a golden world of competitiveness, were it not for the doubts about the financing of the two clubs who have been United and Liverpool’s biggest challengers over the past two decades. But nobody could look at United and Liverpool’s form this season and think the two clubs were in any sense comparable.
That United finished eight points above Liverpool last season feels absurd – one of those facts that may technically be true but only complicates matters; you wouldn’t put a tomato in a fruit salad. Liverpool, in terms of recruitment, vision and sense of purpose, are light years ahead. While Old Trafford crumbles, a footballing House of Usher, Liverpool will open the new Anfield Road stand on Sunday.
United have become like some mythical beast, vast, tempestuous and disappointed, tameable only by some great hero blessed by the gods, usually from Lanarkshire. Its very size, bloated by history, seems to make it unmanageable.
Memory is always there to provide a cruel counterpoint. As United slunk out of the Champions League this past week, what was damning was less the defeat itself than the contrast with the past. Twenty-four years ago, United trailing 1-0 to Bayern in a crucial game was the prelude to perhaps the greatest finish to any final. But the spirit of invincibility has gone; this season United’s Champions League campaign has been characterised not by the preposterous comebacks of old but by ridiculous collapses, chaos and, ultimately, by limpness.
On Tuesday, there wasn’t even that. Perhaps the nature of the performance was partly conditioned by injury but there was also a terrible sense of fear about it, as though the risk of a hammering outweighed the potential reward of going through – which, given Bayern had lost their previous game 5-1, suggests just how beaten down the mindset at Old Trafford has become.
Last season, Ten Hag seemed a gimlet-eyed winner, somebody who finally had the clarity of vision to refashion United; this season he looks like Ming the Merciless if he had settled down with Hilda from Ever Decreasing Circles. United have sapped at him as they sap at every new manager and every new signing.
Last season, Ten Hag was rightly praised for having the pragmatism to abandon his preference for a high line and a goalkeeper who plays out from the back in the face of the reality of the squad. He made the tough calls. He offloaded Cristiano Ronaldo and David de Gea. He persuaded the club to spend big on Antony, Rasmus Højlund and Onana. Yet 18 months after he took the job, there is still no clear understanding of how he wants United to play, limited refinement of the squad, little sense of progress.
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Harry Maguire and Scott McTominay, two players he tried to sell, remain key. Anthony Martial is still there, despite managers from José Mourinho onwards trying to ship him out. Jonny Evans has returned, a ghostly reminder of previous greatness, a perfectly sensible patch who has been pressed into service too often. But that’s the modern United: all gaps and cracks and patches, half a dozen architects’ blueprints cobbled together and then abandoned. Sorting out the United squad is starting to seem like the 13th labour Hercules could not quite face.
And so, once again, we enter the doom zone when it feels as if every defeat may be the last, from which very few managers escape. Last month’s manager of the month award is a misleading joke based on a quirk of the fixture list, a once-in-a-lifetime strike from Alejandro Garnacho and Everton’s problems with converting chances at home.
Except this is a doom zone at United, a club that would routinely hand out lengthy contracts to failing players to maintain their market value. Hesitation has become a club trait anyway but as everybody waits to find out what Ratcliffe’s arrival will mean, there would have to be some sort of catastrophic failure for Ten Hag to be ousted.
United are the only club in the world where the death spiral has a holding pattern. That may give Ten Hag hope, but it feels like history deferred.
