The most disappointing thing that happened to Manchester United last week was not the 3-0 defeat to Manchester City – that was expected – nor even the 3-0 defeat to Newcastle United – at least that was only the Carabao Cup.
No, the worst moment came in Erik ten Hag’s interview after the City game with Viaplay Netherlands, who asked him when we could expect to see his Manchester United team play like his Ajax team. The answer was as simple as it was stunning: “Never.”
“We will never play the football I played at Ajax here ... Your player material determines how you will play. That is why we play here in a different way than I did at Ajax. That will have to be the case, because I can’t play the same way. That is not in the DNA of Manchester United. The football at Ajax is very characteristic [of Ajax], here we will play much more directly. We also have the players for that, especially at the front.”
The immediate reaction was to wonder if this was a fake quote. The whole point of hiring Ten Hag was to bring the Ajax magic to Manchester – and yet here he was saying that would never happen? But no, he really did say this, and it wasn’t lost in translation as he was speaking in Dutch.
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At Friday’s press conference reporters asked him to explain what he meant by these quotes. “I thought the explanation from my point of view was totally wrong,” he began, before essentially restating the exact line that had been attributed to him. “I can’t play like Ajax because I have different players. So, I came here with my philosophy, based on possession. But also to combine it with the DNA of Manchester United, and combine it with the players, with the competences, sorry, with the characters of the players.”
Clutching your head you thought, oh God, please, please stop talking about Manchester United DNA. It’s automatically awkward when anyone talks about DNA in a football context, because the underlying concept – that every club has an essential footballing nature or style – is nonsensical. Ten Hag’s use of it here was doubly awkward because it suggested he doesn’t understand Manchester United at all.
Ten Hag’s use of the DNA metaphor may be an unfortunate legacy of his time in Amsterdam. Ajax and Barcelona are the two clubs most fond of talking about their DNA. They also happen to be the two big European clubs who have chosen to define themselves by a specific style of play.
Manchester United are the opposite of these clubs. Their defining figure, Alex Ferguson, was a shapeshifter who had no attachment whatsoever to any particular style of play. The only thing he cared about was winning, and he would embrace whatever style he felt would be most effective at the time.
If that meant he had to fill his side with tough guys who could outbattle Premier League opposition in the early 1990s, that’s what he did. If it meant playing high-tempo attacking football to outscore Arsenal in the late 1990s, that’s what he did. If it meant hiring Carlos Queiroz to dial down the tempo to master the cagier European football of the 2000s, then ... you get the picture.
His late teams were defined by flexibility, switching from possession attack to counterattack to obstinate defence depending on what was required in the moment. The outstanding achievements of that era included Ronaldo winning the Ballon d’Or with a 42-goal season, and Edwin van der Sar setting an all-time English record for consecutive clean sheets – 14 matches and 22 hours without conceding a goal!
United have always been a team of many faces. So why is Ten Hag suggesting that there is something in their particular DNA which means they want to play direct? There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with direct football, but United already had six years of that with Ole Gunnar Solskjær and Jose Mourinho. Ten Hag was supposed to bring something different.
He was supposed to do what his peers are doing at United’s rival clubs. What would Manchester City have thought if Pep Guardiola had turned up in 2016 and, instead of booting out Joe Hart on day one because he didn’t fit the system, he had talked about building a team in tune with City’s DNA? They would have been appalled.
Jürgen Klopp was counterpressing from day one at Liverpool. He didn’t say: ‘I don’t have the players here to play the style that made me famous at Dortmund, so I’m going to do something completely different’. Instead he established the style and gradually brought in the players who would make it work.
Arsenal hired Mikel Arteta hoping that he could recreate something of the style of Manchester City. Some of the players didn’t fit the new system. Arteta’s response was not to throw out the plan and figure out a style that would suit the likes of Mesut Özil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. He got rid of them, at the cost of a lot of money and political capital, and replaced them with players who could play the way he wanted.
The coaches, not the clubs, are the bearers of “football DNA”, if by DNA we mean a style of play. Ten Hag’s retreat from the task of replicating the style that made him famous makes you wonder if Ten Hag football was really just Frenkie de Jong football all along.
It is remarkable to think that it’s only eight months since Ten Hag was dancing with Lisandro Martinez and Antony on the Wembley turf after beating Newcastle in the Carabao Cup final. “The Erik ten Hag era has begun” the club tweeted that evening. “Erik ten Hag has transformed this club” said Owen Hargreaves. “Ten Hag is a clear thinker and a straight talker with a laser-like vision of what he wants. This has been a no-nonsense revolution,” claimed the Daily Mail. A “veteran club employee” would tell the Sunday Times the following week that Casemiro was “our most important signing since Eric Cantona”.
The day that quote was published, Casemiro led United to a 7-0 defeat at Anfield, and since the summer he is playing as though he has aged five years. Meanwhile, Ten Hag’s clear-thinking and laser-like vision has blurred.
Last season he could delight fans and media simply by punishing players: forcing the squad to run 13.8km the day after Brentford outran them by that margin, dropping Marcus Rashford for being fractionally late to a team meeting. Most significantly, he expunged Ronaldo after the ridiculous Piers Morgan interview in which he criticised the manager and the club. Ronaldo’s exit was the cue for United’s best run of form under Ten Hag, demonstrating the value of a good scapegoating.
The impression of a steely figure, firmly in control, proved fleeting. He tried to sell Harry Maguire and Scott McTominay, failed in both attempts, and has now had to go crawling back to them as the players he intended to use in their place either got injured (Lisandro Martinez) or failed to perform (Mason Mount).
He bombed Jadon Sancho out of the squad after Sancho’s inflammatory post after the Arsenal defeat which effectively called him a liar. The problem is that Sancho is still at the club and now he is winning the power struggle by default. Imagine his delight watching Wednesday’s 0-3, knowing that there’s a good chance he can outlast the manager he refuses to apologise to.
Ten Hag failed to heed Machiavelli’s advice: “Men must either be caressed or else annihilated; they will revenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones; the injury therefore that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance”. If you’re going to move against players, you must make sure to finish the job.
United is admittedly a uniquely difficult environment for managers. Maguire noted in a recent interview that it was “the most-scrutinised club in the world” (United players used to say “biggest”, but Maguire’s phrase seemed more accurate). After eight defeats in 15 matches this season – the worst start to a season in more than 60 years – somebody, soon, is going to have to take the fall.
The processes by which guilt and blame are ultimately assigned are not strictly rational and can be hard to predict. Imagine the surprise of Bruno Fernandes, United’s best player since he arrived in 2020, to discover in the wake of the crushing City defeat that some TV pundits had identified his lack of character as one of the reasons why United had struggled. Bruno at least got to sit out most of the second humiliation of the week: by the time he was subbed on against Newcastle, the team was already 3-0 down. For Ten Hag, there is nowhere to hide.
