Manchester United were “erratic” under former manager Erik ten Hag, whose preference for Dutch players influenced the Red Devils’ summer signings, says club co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe.
Ten Hag took charge at Old Trafford in 2022, managing 128 games before being sacked by Ratcliffe’s managerial team in October last year having delivered two trophies in two seasons.
The Dutchman’s appointment predates the arrival of INEOS, and he lasted a little under a year after the group acquired a 27.7% stake in the club. When asked how he found the performances under the old boss, Ratcliffe told Gary Neville on The Overlap “erratic is the best word I’d use.”
He added: “When we won the FA Cup against Man City they all turned up and they played like they were in a cup final, then at other times, Crystal Palace or whatever, they didn’t show up.”
He went on to throw his weight behind current manager Ruben Amorim, insisting “it was difficult at the beginning” but that now “we’ve seen some progress” as some of the club’s summer signings start to settle.
Those signings were made with Ten Hag in mind and have been inherited by Amorim, who may well have looked elsewhere for players to fit his carefully-crafted 3-4-3 formation.
Ratcliffe said he is convinced the recruitment from last summer will come good and shed light on what sounds like a hectic time at the top.
“We didn’t have the luxury of time to prepare for last summer,” he said, explaining that Technical Director Jason Wilcox had been in post only around three weeks and CEO Omar Berrada three days, and that a decision needed to be made quickly as to whether to involve Ten Hag in the decision making.
The businessman confirmed that the coach “was involved in the discussions” and this is “why there were one or two Dutch players” brought on board, although he caveated this by noting that “the decision on a new player or a purchase isn’t the decision of one person, it’s a group of people who influence that decision one way or another.”
During this section of the long interview Ratcliffe made much of the time constraints he and his team were facing in the summer, and explained that this was a contributing factor to their making “the wrong decision” over keeping Ten Hag.
“I think there were some mitigating circumstances in having made that decision but at the end of the day it was the wrong decision so, hands up, you know,” he said.
Those circumstances largely relate to the Old Trafford mess which left Ten Hag facing the same thankless task as all the managers who took control after the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson in 2013.
Ratcliffe explained that he, Wilcox, Berrada and Sir Dave Brailsford had only been together for “a matter of weeks” when they had to make the call over the Dutchman’s future, and that they had to pick out what was down to him and what was beyond his control.
He said: “It was quite difficult to extract, in that season when we arrived, Erik’s performance from the structure around him because obviously the structure around [a United manager] now is completely different.
“If I looked today there’s a really strong relationship and a really strong support culture for Ruben with Jason, so Jason and Ruben talk to each other two or three times a day. Omar speaks to Ruben every day, every time I go to a match I speak to Ruben so there’s a support structure there.
“But it was quite difficult to see what environment Erik was operating in, in other words was the erratic performance a function of Erik or was it a function of the organisation?
“We couldn’t really get to the bottom of answering that question with certainty, so we gave Erik the benefit of the doubt.”
Feature image Carl Recine via Getty Images
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Joe Ponting
Joe has spent more than half his life writing about football and all of it following United. As a child he told a doctor his name was ‘Paul Scholes’, but could never pick a pass like him no matter how much he tried.
