While Erik ten Hag prepares his team for Saturday’s FA Cup final, his Manchester United superiors are preparing for a future that is increasingly unlikely to have the Dutch coach in it.
The club have already made contact with potential candidates as they explore what to do should they decide to make a change — though nothing has been communicated to Ten Hag to say the end is coming. On the eve of possible silverware at Wembley, the man who may deliver it is in the dark about what the key members of United’s hierarchy intend to do, even if he must have his suspicions.
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It all seems to point to Ten Hag being shown the door and this awkward dynamic on the eve of a final against Manchester City has not gone unnoticed among United’s players.
The perceived duplicity sits uneasily — but amid the practicalities of their situation, it is also understandable why United’s decision-makers feel they need to act.
Life is filled with unwritten rules. Don’t push into queues. Don’t wear underpants on top of jeans. The captain should always be the last to leave a sinking ship. Graffiti artists will never spray-paint a place of worship.
In the Albanian highlands, life is governed by the tribal code of Kanun, complex statutes of pride that have been kept alive orally for five centuries and can violently erupt into blood feuds. Even the mafia has the lore of omerta.
Across sport, cricket players give themselves out if they nick the ball behind, a baseball batter will never bunt to break up a no-hitter.
Football has no such thing. The world’s most valuable sport is capitalism manifest, a god-eat-god environment where superclubs will do everything inside the regulations — and possibly some things outside them — to gain an advantage.
Though football might have a “tapping-up law”, whereby clubs cannot make contact directly with players and coaches while they are contracted to a rival, possibly the only unwritten law in the game is that this written law is utterly worthless. There is no set way of doing things.
Here, Manchester United are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
There are parallels with the removal of David Moyes at West Ham United this month, where it was known with two games remaining that the club had gone behind his back to appoint Julen Lopetegui. The days before Moyes was formally notified led to awkwardness across the training ground, with technical director Tim Steidten barred from the first-team dressing room. Similarly, it is not ideal preparation for Manchester United’s players to line up at Wembley with any certainty over the man who sent them out there.
In Moyes’ last days, it was widely written that the veteran coach had been afforded a lack of respect, the victim of underhand dealings to quietly nudge him out the door. Moyes, of course, has already endured a similarly bruising experience at Old Trafford, where he discovered his fate via newspaper headlines.
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At West Ham, however, the timing of the decision at least allowed Moyes to have clarity — after he was told, he had the opportunity to enjoy one more home game.
Most crucially, West Ham’s actions allowed them to secure Lopetegui, who had interested several other clubs, including Bayern Munich, at the time the London club were looking to make an appointment.
In this environment, treating people well is seen as a luxury rather than a necessity. Manchester United may want to do well by Ten Hag, but they have an ultimate duty to do right by themselves.
It is a dual-imperative, but a dual-imperative where the scales are loaded on one side — if the club is always bigger than the individual, the individual may pay a price.
If Manchester United have decided to move forward without Ten Hag, they risk criticism if the delay in starting the process costs them a potential candidate.
This summer’s managerial market is highly competitive; United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Juventus have all looked, are looking, or are expected to be looking for a new manager this summer. One step below them, Brighton are trying to appoint an up-and-coming coach. If Manchester United stand still they risk missing out.
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Ipswich Town’s Kieran McKenna, for example, is also a target for Brighton and Chelsea. Both clubs have their own virtues to offer: Brighton can provide possibly the best working structure in the Premier League, and while Chelsea do not have that, they do have some of the world’s most talented young players.
Another aspect of this competition is that it is almost impossible for Manchester United to go about their inquiries in anonymity. Any information is golden — rival clubs cannot be discreet when both themselves and agents are shopping in the same store. Ten Hag was bound to get a sense of what the club’s owners were up to even if he had not been told directly by the club.
Remember, as well, that this is not a one-way street. At some stage of their career, almost every coach in a job has either discussed the prospect of moving to a club where there is an incumbent, or surreptitiously explored leaving a club to whom they were contracted. Ten Hag, for example, left FC Utrecht midway through the 2017-18 Eredivisie season to take the Ajax job that would launch his career.
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The fact that nobody at Old Trafford has yet informed Ten Hag of his likely fate feels brutal — but by the same logic of having a duty to the club, rather than the individual, it could be argued that Manchester United have the best chance of winning the FA Cup with a manager who still believes they are fighting for their job, however misguided that may be, than one who is already resigned to his fate.
The past five months have been a slow burn, but it should be of no surprise that INEOS’ key members are now moving to act with ruthlessness as they seek to enact their long-term goals. Ask cyclist Chris Froome, a seven-time Grand Tour winner at the INEOS Grenadiers (formerly Team Sky), who suffered a crash in 2019 that left him with a fractured right femur, a fractured elbow, and fractured ribs. Just over 12 months later, and unable to fully return to his previous level, his contract was not renewed.
Ask the workers at the INEOS-owned Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland, whose workforce voted to strike in a dispute over pensions back in 2013. It was brutally quashed by Ratcliffe, who threatened to withdraw his funding, potentially delivering mass unemployment to a town reliant on the refinery’s status.
In that sense, Ten Hag’s future should also be placed amid the context of Manchester United’s staff more generally, with INEOS expected to embark on a streamlining process over the summer which could lead to job losses of up to 20 per cent across the club.
Ten Hag is not alone in his predicament — although he undeniably finds himself in a desperate situation. But if Manchester United need to find their long-term coach, and Ten Hag is not that man, they cannot afford to wait politely outside the marketplace; the one priority is to elbow their way onto the cobbles and be in a position to raise their hands.
Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola are the two coaches who have defined this era of the Premier League. They were approached when their predecessors, Brendan Rodgers and Manuel Pellegrini, were still in place. Liverpool first spoke to Klopp when Rodgers was preparing for a Merseyside derby, Manchester City began conversations with Guardiola when Pellegrini had the majority of a season to run.
After the ensuing nine years of success, few supporters mourn the treatment of their predecessors. It is impossible to say their employers did wrong.
It is hard, personally, on Ten Hag. But this is why Manchester United have to be decisive. They also have to be right.
GO DEEPER
Ten Hag and Van Gaal: A warning from Manchester United history
(Top photo: Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images)