The announcement was made this week that Ralf Rangnick’s time at Manchester United has ended and he won’t be transiting from interim manager into a consultancy role, something the club had planned when he first arrived at the club at the end of last year.
The German tactician had been positioned to transition into a two-year consultancy role at Old Trafford, but his stint came to a premature end to allow him to focus solely on the job of managing the Austria team.
Now it’s anyone’s guess if he could have been a galvanising influence on the way Manchester United is run. Realistically also, one wonders whether Rangnick would really have been given the power he needed at United in a consultancy role or whether that was just the carrot dangling on the proverbial stick to attract him to stick as the interim manager.
Also, the more fitting question at this juncture now would be to ask if he even deserves that role in the first place, considering his bleak performance?
Much has been said in the past week about Rangnick’s job at United. Obviously far from a success story, having won just 11 games from 29, he will leave the club as their worst manager for half a century since Frank O’Farrell’s brief reign in charge in the early 1970s.
Speaking on ESPN FC, former Chelsea and Scotland midfielder Craig Burley was extremely critical of Rangnick and United in his conversation with Mark Ogden, saying: “Quite frankly, Ralf Rangnick was just out of his depth wasn’t he? It became quite apparent early on that he was out of his depth.
“Now, there was a bit of everything going on here. There was underperforming players, there were leaks to the media, there was everything. But it was crystal clear that he had no solution on the field, nothing.
“There was nothing, absolutely nothing. And that’s not down to players not being bothered, not after a couple of games, maybe after three or four months. The responsibility lies with the Manchester United board.
“So it was crystal clear Rangnick was out of his depth but just notch this on the board as one of the hundreds of bad decisions this club has made in the last eight or nine years since Sir Alex Ferguson left the club.”