52-year-old soon to be Ajax ex-boss Erik ten Hag has agreed a deal to become Manchester United’s new boss from the beginning of the 2022-23 season and the Dutchman will indeed be most mindful of the immensity of the task on his hands.
The Ajax boss will be setting foot onto an Old Trafford laden with evolving drama at Old Trafford, with the club having spiralled ludicrously out of control during years of mismanagement and poor recruitment after the Sir Alex Ferguson era. It is greatly hoped that Ten Hag will be able to change all that with his progressive, contemporary approach, having been preferred over Mauricio Pochettino for the role he will no doubt be clear over what he needs to do to steady the long-tottering giant.
Ten Hag is said to be incubating ‘a five-year plan’ for the club which he allegedly unveiled during his round of interviews with United’s John Murtough and Darren Fletcher, but what will that plan for a club desperate for success entail?
Having been managed for way too long either by coaches with antiquated methods or those who had no reason to be there in the first place, United have been subjected to a cross-pollination of contrasting styles, evolving into a mish-mash toxic football culture and playing style that are totally unrecognisable, clearly devoid of a unified, collective approach. That is obviously intolerable for a club trying to restore themselves to their former glory at the highest pinnacles of the game.
Understandably Ten Hag is hardly expected to hit the ground running and immediately pick up the gauntlet to start challenging Premier League gargantuans Manchester City and Liverpool for major honors from the get-go, but the Dutchman at the very least needs to look like he has some sort of a plan to develop a semblance of a Manchester United style of play, something that has been lacking for too long.
Upon crossing the United threshold, Ten Hag will obviously start work on this process in his first season and hopefully within a short period should have a clear idea who he wants in his side going forward. The way things have been slated, the contracts of Cristiano Ronaldo, Marcus Rashford, Luke Shaw, Fred, David de Gea, Diogo Dalot and Nemanja Matic all expire in 2023. Some of those will obviously sign new deals by then while others will be let off. The Dutchman is only too well aware he has inherited the unenviable Herculean task of cleaning the Aegean stables in order to get United into the shape the Old Trafford top brass wants.
While Ten Hag is likely to be given some sort of a grace period to deliver the goods within the first two seasons, a seasoned campaigner like him should know only too well that those same supporters who warmly welcome him into the fold are the same ones who will invariably be baying for his bloody should the silverware be slow in coming into the club.
Case in point is Jurgen Klopp who was often pilloried for failing to bring a trophy to Liverpool in his first few seasons, and it was only at the end of his third full season that he brought the Champions League to the club. Although the new United boss might not be expected, hopefully, to win anything quite that substantial, silverware of some sort will still be needed to keep the hordes at bay.
It isn’t clear how Manchester City and Liverpool will look by the 2025-26 season, but as it stands it is highly unlikely that neither Pep Guardiola nor Jurgen Klopp will still be helming their current managerial positions and the success of those two clubs could well depend on the successors of those two titans. Which should be about the time when Ten Hag – if he is still at United then – should have gotten his side slick and comfortable as they interact with the elite squads of current years.
The Dutchman’s task is a daunting one – that of restoring the Red Devils to the summit of the English and European games, and the countdown has already begun even way before he has officially stepped into the club’s once hallowed grounds as its next full-time manager.
Everything has been placed on Ten Hag’s shoulders has to get United to back onto the lofty perch that Sir Alex Ferguson had erected once upon a glorious time.