Most of us thought Manchester United’s trip to Anfield would be the dazzling nadir by which we remember the Erik ten Hag era.
The meat-grinder moment for a head coach who fought with admirable stoicism as he was mulched by a club that mulches all who pass through it.
Instead we saw a very different kind of humiliation, one that weary eyes might not even have noticed.
Jose Mourinho once took United to Anfield and played out a 0-0 draw that had pundits spitting teeth at a cowering defensive shape unbefitting of such a great club. Six years later and the similarities are uncanny - except that six years of spiritual decay have lowered expectations sufficiently enough for an identical 0-0 draw at Liverpool to be lauded as a decent point.
Fast forward six days and they're losing 2-0 at David Moyes' West Ham...
Their injury crisis isn’t enough to justify a complete absence of creative intent. Rather, across a vacuous campaign thus far, standards have diminished to such an extent that Manchester United are applauded for avoiding annihilation.
Everything at the club is in a holding pattern, from the part-takeover to the manager to the tactical identity, which at Anfield and beyond has been entirely formless.
Even their league position is immune to the natural cycles that afflict other clubs. They win, lose, or draw seemingly at random. They go nowhere and everything stays the same.
But wait, change is afoot! Sir Jim Ratcliffe will soon arrive to take over footballing operations and, giving Old Trafford a spruce, solve all their problems.
Never in English football – not even in our age of hyper-capitalism - has the sale of so few shares been so widely celebrated as a moment of revolution.
That is not meant as a slight against Manchester United supporters clinging desperately to good news and justifiably buoyed by any and all acts that weaken the Glazers’ suffocating grip, but it is surprising that so few pundits are questioning how much Ratcliffe can change with £240million for infrastructure investment and the promise of controlling the day-to-day.
In the four years since Ratcliffe’s Ineos bought Nice, the French club have gone decisively backwards. Christophe Galtier, recent Ligue 1 winner with Lille, fell out with the owners and, upon leaving, questioned the calibre of people hired to make transfer decisions. Big money was spent and Nice fell into mid-table.
By 2022, an audit saw Ratcliffe’s brother Bob removed as CEO – welcome news for fans – but a new recruitment team started buying up Premier League has-beens, marking a sad decline from the exciting young club that had challenged for the title only two years before the Ineos purchase. A good run at the start of 2023/24 has seen them rise to second but it is unlikely to last.
And so chances of Ratcliffe turning around the world’s most troubled club are slim. Even if he was the right man in the right place at the right time, taking United back to the summit is a five-to-10-year project.
It took Liverpool’s Fenway Sports Group eight years, and that was with a generational genius in Jurgen Klopp willing to take the reins.
Ten Hag is not Klopp. United’s tactical emptiness this season and last is difficult to explain, although the Dutchman has had a go: “Those were different players,” he said of his Ajax team. “We are playing different football than I showed at Ajax because I have to, because I can't play the same way. The players decide how you play.”
The implication is that Man Utd’s slow and sluggish defence, passive and ageing midfield, and fast and straight-lined forwards necessitates a more direct style of football. That would be a reasonable explanation if United actually played with a discernible tactical identity – and if Ten Hag had simply inherited the current squad.
Ten Hag has signed eight of United’s first-choice XI and net spent £320million on transfer fees alone. Virtually all of them have been disappointing, over-priced, a bad fit, or all three.
Antony, Lisandro Martinez and Andre Onana – the Ajax lot – are clearly not worth what was paid. Rasmus Hojlund carries an absurd price tag and is too young to be leading the line. Casemiro and Christian Eriksen were stop-gaps and it shows.
United’s problem is that their historic size and current reputation are too far apart, meaning nobody world-class or destined for the top would choose their club over others.
That means their scouting department must be better than anyone else’s and that whoever signs off on transfers must be willing to take risks; risks like grabbing Declan Rice two years ago, which United could have done, or like Chelsea’s when they took a punt on Cole Palmer.
It leaves Man Utd with a transfer team whose decisions cannot be trusted, a new part-owner with the same problem, and a wage bill too high for much manoeuvrability anyway.
Add to that Ten Hag’s tactical malaise, questionable man-management that includes freezing out Jadon Sancho and making Bruno Fernandes captain, and woeful underperformance in the Champions League - and two things seem obvious.
First, Ten Hag won’t last. Maybe he will limp through the year, but this is not a project with a bright future.
Second, Manchester United need a total overhaul from Ratcliffe and, next summer, will be at year zero of a project that demands something close to perfection for a decade before the club can get back to the top.
That future is too ominous to contemplate, so let’s refocus on the here and now. Ten Hag seems out of ideas.
United are the Premier League’s only aimless and idealess club, wafting about in the same existential funk as they were in throughout the Jose Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer years.
The huge injury list is a factor and more hopeful United supporters will argue Ten Hag’s tactics might come together if he had Mason Mount, Casemiro, and Martinez to call upon. But do we really believe anything would have been different, or anything more positive, over the last few weeks if those three were on the field?
“I only had two midfield players and had no one else to compensate that. I had no chance to bring the game in another direction so I think it is a positive point for us.”
That is true of United's 0-0 draw at Anfield on 17th December, but those comments were actually made by Mourinho after the same result in 2017.
So much has happened since then and yet at the same time nothing at all.
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