In Defense Of Ten Hag

Eighteen months after the sack, the manager who delivered two trophies in two years, posted the highest debut-stretch win rate the Premier League has ever seen, and was the only manager since Ferguson to combine top-three with silverware deserves a more honest reading than he got. Given a healthy first eleven and recruitment that fit his system, the case is genuinely there that he could have gone on to win the league.

The In Defense Of series isn't a tribute. The job is to look at a manager fans have moved on from and ask whether the moving-on was earned. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is "kind of," with caveats. Erik ten Hag is closer to the second one, and the caveats lean heavily in his favor when you actually read the record.

He has been the best post-Ferguson coach at Manchester United on the evidence available. Carrick’s story is still being written but currently he’s not at that level yet. Top three plus a trophy in year one, which no other post-Ferguson manager has done. The highest first-25-games win rate of any Premier League manager debut on record. Two domestic trophies in two seasons, the only post-Ferguson manager to combine cup silverware with league success at the same time. The captain who just won Footballer of the Year is the captain Ten Hag built around. The academy product who is currently the dressing room's emotional center is the academy product Ten Hag promoted.

What he didn't have was a recruitment department that could close deals at the right number, the proven attackers he repeatedly asked for in the windows that mattered, or a structure capable of giving him first-choice targets instead of fall-back projects. He delivered two trophies and a top-three finish the year after the worst points total in United's modern history (the year before he arrived) and a year-two injury crisis that broke the spine of the team. The coaching was extraordinary. The structure around the coaching was not. That is the part of the story that has been most consistently distorted in eighteen months of public conversation about him.

Given a healthy first eleven and recruitment that actually fit his system, the case is genuinely there that Erik ten Hag could have gone on to win the Premier League at Manchester United. That sentence is not as outlandish as the 2024 sacking made it sound.

What he actually did

In his first season, 2022/23, Ten Hag finished third in the Premier League and won the Carabao Cup. He is the only manager since Sir Alex Ferguson to achieve top three plus a trophy in his first season at Manchester United.

Not van Gaal, who finished fourth in year one and won the FA Cup in year two. Not Mourinho, who finished sixth in year one and won the League Cup plus Europa. Not Solskjær, not Moyes, not Rangnick. Only Ten Hag. The 2023 Carabao Cup was the first League Cup at United since Ferguson's last one in 2010, a thirteen-year drought ended on a Casemiro header and a Rashford-credited deflected goal at Wembley. It was also the first trophy of any kind at United since Mourinho's Europa League in 2017.

His first 25 games in charge of Manchester United produced a 72 percent win rate. That was the highest first-25-games win rate of any Premier League manager on record. Higher than Pep Guardiola's first 25 games at City (56 percent). Higher than Jurgen Klopp's first 25 at Liverpool (48 percent). Higher than Mikel Arteta's first 25 at Arsenal (56 percent). The best debut stretch the Premier League had ever seen, full stop. After 50 Premier League matches, Ten Hag's points haul was 96, ahead of Mourinho (95), van Gaal (94), Solskjær (85).

There was a stretch from late October 2022 to early March 2023 where it felt like United could play anyone in the world and win. The Manchester derby win at Old Trafford in January in which Bruno scored, Rashford scored, and Garnacho came off the bench to set up the third. The 3-0 wins over Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth in February in which Casemiro looked like the best defensive midfielder in the league. The Liverpool victories. The Barcelona elimination. The Newcastle final. It was arguably the brightest stretch of football at Old Trafford in the post-Ferguson era. Anyone who was watching that year remembers it.

It was also the year Ten Hag got the best individual season out of Marcus Rashford that Rashford has produced anywhere on a Premier League stage. Thirty goals across all competitions. The Carabao Cup-winning goal. The version of Rashford that Barcelona has been seeing for the past nine months at Camp Nou is roughly the version Ten Hag had at Old Trafford in 2022/23.

The rest of that squad was equally lifted by Ten Hag's management. Bruno was the captain who would later win Footballer of the Year, and his goals-and-assists output that season was a career year at the time. Lisandro Martinez was the signing of the summer, a defender Premier League pundits insisted was too short to play in England before he became one of the league's best center-backs in his debut year. Luke Shaw played the best football of his United career. Raphael Varane reminded everyone he was Raphael Varane. Casemiro arrived in August and was the Premier League's best defensive midfielder by January. Antony was overpriced and Ten Hag's tenure never fully recovered from the fee, but the player himself was a useful pressing winger who put up double-digit goal involvements. Wan-Bissaka, Dalot, McTominay, Fred, Eriksen, even Martial in his half-season cameos, all of them got better.

That doesn't happen by accident. That happens because a manager and a coaching staff are making good players better, which is the job description.

The season turned on the night Lisandro Martinez fractured his fifth metatarsal in the Europa League quarter-final first leg against Sevilla on April 13. United were 2-0 up. They drew 2-2 after two late own goals, lost Martinez and Varane on the same night, and were eliminated 5-2 on aggregate by the team that went on to win the competition that year. If Martinez doesn't go down on that play with no opponent involved, the Europa League is genuinely on the table. It is the moment the magical first season ended.

The Carabao Cup and the FA Cup

Two trophies in two years. The Carabao Cup in 2023. The FA Cup in 2024, against Manchester City, in a match Ten Hag's squad were not expected to compete in, let alone win. Beating Pep Guardiola's City in a Wembley final with the squad he had at that moment is one of the harder things a United manager has done in the post-Ferguson era.

Ten Hag is the only post-Ferguson manager other than Mourinho to win multiple trophies at United. He is also the only post-Ferguson manager to do it in back to back seasons.

The trophies do not erase the wider problems of the 2023/24 season. The league finish was eighth. The football was, by stretches, ugly. The Champions League group-stage exit was thudding. The press coverage from January onward was about whether he would survive the summer. But the trophies happened. The FA Cup against City is the last trophy Manchester United has lifted. Eighteen months later, it remains the most recent meaningful thing on the wall.

What he inherited

Ten Hag arrived in the summer of 2022 to a club whose football operation had been gutted. Ed Woodward, the architect of the post-Ferguson commercial empire and serial-overpayer-on-transfer-fees, had just departed. The replacement structure was Richard Arnold as CEO and Matt Judge as head of negotiations. They were two executives whose football competence was widely questioned by the press at the time, and whose decisions in the transfer market across the next twelve months would do most of the proving on that question. There was no director of football. There was no head of recruitment with a coherent process. There was no one whose job it was to identify the manager-shaped hole that Ferguson's retirement had left at the strategic-football level.

What Ten Hag inherited as a roster was worse than the public memory now suggests. Cristiano Ronaldo was still on the books, would publicly fall out with the club inside six months, would give the Piers Morgan interview that ended his second United career, and would leave for Saudi in the winter. Jadon Sancho would publicly fall out with Ten Hag in year two and refuse to apologize for accusations Ten Hag made about his training-ground behavior. Alejandro Garnacho, the academy product Ten Hag promoted and trusted, would show up to preseason training minutes late with his boots still untied, which is not the body language of a player ready to train when training starts. Antony was overpriced because Arnold and Judge negotiated late in the window and turned a reasonable signing into a punchline. Mason Greenwood's situation was its own structural mess that the club's communications strategy did not have answers for.

Six first-team players left for free in Ten Hag's first summer. The transfer business he was given that summer was decent. Casemiro, Eriksen, Martinez, Antony, Malacia. But the structural inefficiency around the Antony fee told you everything you needed to know about how United's transfer department was operating. That structural inefficiency was not unique to the Antony deal. Across multiple windows under Ten Hag, United consistently paid above the going rate for the players they wanted, because the negotiating posture of the people doing the negotiating gave selling clubs full leverage. That is not on the manager. That is on the people writing the checks and running the talks. Identifying the wrong player can at times be blamed on the manager. Closing the deal at the right number is not.

He asked for seasoned, ready-now players in the windows that mattered. He repeatedly got the second-choice version. The summer of 2023 is the cleanest illustration. He was promised Harry Kane as the proven Premier League No. 9 the system needed. Bayern Munich got Kane. United got Rasmus Hojlund, a 20-year-old project striker with one season of European-level senior football behind him. Same window, same problem at center-back: Kim Min-jae was the target, Ten Hag's first choice, with the Guardian reporting a "done deal" understanding from United's side. Bayern got Kim. United got Jonny Evans on a free.

Evans is a United hero and a value signing in the right context, and he played his role with dignity. He was also 35 years old in a system built around aggressive high-line defending, which is not what a 35-year-old center-back can give you. The fact that United had to ask him to do it is the structural failure, not a knock on Evans. The pattern in summer 2023 was that Ten Hag identified two top-tier players, both went to Bayern Munich, and United's pivots were a teenager and a veteran on a free. That is not a manager being backed.

Some of the structural failure has not been surfaced enough in the public conversation. The recruitment department that had failed under prior regimes was sidelined when Ten Hag arrived, and the new department running things was inexperienced and reportedly heavily influenced by SEG, Ten Hag's own agency, in a way that did not produce an outsized number of SEG players on the squad but did seem to dominate how transfer business was actually executed. A steady, experienced hand in the market is what the operation needed. INEOS is providing that now, two and a half years late, for a manager who didn't have it.

The medical department deserves its own section in any honest reading of Ten Hag's tenure. The 2023/24 season exposed it. Luke Shaw and Tyrell Malacia were both injured at the start of the campaign. The club's reading at the time was that both would be back inside the early months of the season. United signed Sergio Reguilón on loan from Tottenham as deadline-day cover. By December, with both left-backs still unavailable and the medical projections still saying recovery was imminent, the club activated the January break clause in Reguilón's loan and sent him back to Spurs. Shaw was then unavailable for the FA Cup match the next week. Malacia did not feature once in 2023/24. United spent stretches of the season playing Sofyan Amrabat, a defensive midfielder, at left-back in cup ties. Other stretches, Victor Lindelof filled in. Neither was a left-back. Both options destroyed the wide structure that Rashford had been thriving in the year before.

That is the second factor in the Rashford fall-off that the public conversation has not adequately accounted for. Year one, Rashford scored 30 goals on the back of an attacking unit featuring Luke Shaw overlapping from left-back, Anthony Martial as the focal-point false #9 connecting play in build up and in and around the box, and Bruno feeding the runs from the 10. Year two, Shaw was barely available, Martial was injured for most of the season, and the attacking unit was reconfigured to ask Rashford to be the focal point himself. The personal-life issues that emerged in the back half of 2023/24 are real and are on him. The supporting-cast changes that left him without the structure his year-one season was built on are not on him, and they are not on his manager.

The team struggled to score in 2023/24. The summer 2024 window did not bring the attackers Ten Hag had been asking for since 2022/23. While the defensive structure was vastly improved (although without a left back signing) he was again given several youthful players. He asked for patience based on the youth of the team and signings. Instead, he was sacked four months into the season that followed, replaced by Ruben Amorim, and the rest of the timeline tells its own story.

The chaos around his appointment deserves its own line. The season before Ten Hag arrived, United had finished sixth with 58 points, their worst Premier League points total in the club's modern history. Six first-team players left on free transfers in his first summer. He was hired into a building with no director of football, no coherent recruitment process, and a board that did not know how to back a manager structurally. He won the EFL Cup eight months later. Year two delivered an FA Cup against Manchester City in a season scarred by the worst injury crisis United had seen in a decade. He was not a manager being given the conditions to succeed. He delivered anyway.

The structural problem at United in 2022 was not Erik ten Hag. The structural problem at United in 2022 was that the people running football decisions did not know how to run football decisions. Ten Hag inherited that problem, did his actual job (coaching, identifying, developing) at a level that produced two trophies and a top-three finish, and was eventually fired because the people who should have been doing the other job (recruiting, negotiating, building a coherent process) could not catch up to him.

The Amorim parallel

This is the part of the piece that has to be careful, because the In Defense Of series is not a vehicle for attacking the man's successor. Ruben Amorim's tenure at United deserves its own honest reading, and a lot of what went wrong was not his fault either. But the structural data point matters and deserves to be on the table.

Amorim arrived in November 2024 with a clear identity: he plays a 3-4-3 system that demands specific defensive profiles and wing-back movement. INEOS spent the next three transfer windows backing his vision in a way they had never backed Ten Hag's. Matthijs de Ligt, Noussair Mazraoui, Joshua Zirkzee, and Manuel Ugarte all arrived in the summer of 2024, ahead of the manager change, and were all profiles that fit a back-three system. Patrick Dorgu, a left-back increasingly playing as a wing-back in Italy, was signed in January 2025. Ayden Heaven, a midfielder-turned-center-back who looked tailor-made for a left-of-center role in a back three, came in the same window. The summer 2025 windows added more 3-at-the-back-friendly profiles.

INEOS made three windows of signings for Amorim. They made two windows of signings for Ten Hag, neither of them containing the seasoned attackers he asked for repeatedly. He preferred to keep McTominay and sign Amrabat permanently. Instead he was given Ugarte, who it would hard to argue was most like signed for Amorim, who was most likely earmarked as the Ten Hag replacement all along.

You can argue, fairly, that Amorim's system was the wrong fit for the players already at the club and that part of his struggle was the inheritance of Ten Hag's own players in a shape that didn't suit them. You can also argue that Ugarte literally thrived under Amorim before later earning his exit. Both are reasonable. The structural observation that survives both arguments is that the recruitment department at INEOS knew how to back a manager when they wanted to. They didn't want to with Ten Hag the way they wanted to with Amorim, and they wanted to with Amorim more than they wanted to with the manager who helmed arguably the most dangerous United side in decade.

The ticking time bombs

Ten Hag's two-and-a-half-year stretch at Old Trafford included four player situations that would have ended any manager's tenure on their own.

Ronaldo. The Ronaldo problem was an inherited one. Ten Hag's reading was that Ronaldo at 37 in a high-press 4-2-3-1 was not going to function, and the public reading was that the manager was disrespecting a legend. The eventual exit, including the Piers Morgan interview, was Ronaldo's doing, not Ten Hag's. But the noise consumed half of Ten Hag's first season and almost all of his public goodwill.

Rashford. Even in the magical 2022/23 season, the version of Rashford that Ten Hag was getting world-class performances out of was also the version of Rashford that overslept and showed up 45 seconds late to a team meeting before the Wolves fixture on December 31. Ten Hag dropped him from the starting eleven for "internal disciplinary reasons," brought him on at half-time, and watched him score the winning goal in the 76th minute. That sequence is the perfect compressed version of the Ten Hag-Rashford working relationship. The manager held the standard. The player produced. The pattern broke down later, in 2023/24, in incidents that escalated past the point where a forty-five-second lateness could be defused by a goal off the bench. Belfast, the recurring late nights, the slipping focus through the back half of his United career. None of that was on the pitch in 2022/23 because Ten Hag was managing it. Then it was.

Sancho. Year two, public falling-out, Sancho given a month off in year one to sort his head out before things broke down completely. The grace Ten Hag extended to Sancho in 2022/23 is not the action of a manager who is hostile to players. It is the action of a manager trying to keep an asset salvageable, and getting publicly humiliated for it.

Garnacho. The boots-untied story is the kind of thing fans don't see and broadcasters don't report on because it's mundane and embarrassing in a way that doesn't make headlines. Ten Hag promoted him, played him, made him a first-team regular, and dealt with the ego that came back from preseason in year two. That is a manager doing the developmental work the club was supposed to be doing structurally.

All four of these players were managed, in one form or another, by Ten Hag in difficult circumstances. Three of them are not at United anymore. The fourth, Rashford, is on the way out. The club's decision to part with each of them eventually validates Ten Hag's earlier instincts about each.

What he got wrong

Onana is the case worth being careful about, because the public reading is harsher than the actual record supports. Ten Hag wanted a ball-playing goalkeeper. David de Gea was on a sharp decline by the end of 2022/23 and was also genuinely poor on the ball, which was the foundational thing Ten Hag's high-line system needed. Onana came in hot off a Champions League final with Inter and at his best was an elite ball-playing keeper and a plus shot-stopper. His handling and decision-making were always inconsistent, but he had genuinely good moments at United. Ruben Amorim's first match in charge saw Onana credited by his new manager with saving the team. The decline that followed at United was sharp, but Onana was also getting used to his third head coache in roughly sixteen months. He had a decent start to 2024/25 under van Nistelrooy in the immediate wake of Ten Hag's exit. Then Amorim came in and changed the whole system, and Onana suffered the worst from the change of any player in the squad. The signing is on Ten Hag, fairly. His champions league appearance in his first season was a comedy of errors, each worse than the last. He did save a penalty but as was too often he let in goals that any decent keeper should save. But his form from January 24 to November 24 was objectively good. His unorthodox and often unappealing style was still there but he was making it work. Then Amorim stepped in and things started to go downhill. The downward trajectory is partially on a structural environment that nobody was equipped to stabilize after the manager left. He was not the right signing. He was also not as bad a signing as he ended up looking by the end of 2024/25.

The 2023/24 second-half collapse. The football, by stretches, was bad. There were stretches where the team looked uncoached. The injury situation was a real factor, but the manager has to answer for shape and rhythm even when the injuries are not his fault. He did not always answer.

The communication. Ten Hag's press conferences in his final twelve months were not, by Premier League standards, communicative or politically nimble. He was not a natural at managing the United media circus, which is part of the job whether the manager likes it or not.

The persistent inability to land on a settled spine. The midfield combinations across his two-and-a-half years never settled into a coherent best-XI. Some of that was injuries. Some of it was the squad. Some of it was him.

These are real. The In Defense Of frame is not "everything was perfect." The frame is "the public reading is more punitive than the actual record warrants."

What the record actually warrants

Ten Hag at Manchester United:

• Top three in year one, the only post-Ferguson manager to do that.
• A League Cup in 2023, the first since 2017.
• An FA Cup against Manchester City in 2024, the most recent trophy United has lifted.
• The best individual season Marcus Rashford ever produced.
• The promotion of Kobbie Mainoo from academy to international starter inside one calendar year.
• The signing and integration of Lisandro Martinez against the consensus that he was too small for the Premier League.
• A 2022/23 season in which Bruno, Rashford, Martinez, Shaw, Varane, Casemiro, Dalot, Wan-Bissaka, McTominay, Eriksen and Fred all produced career or career-resurgent campaigns at the same time.

The deeper case, the one that's harder to put in a bullet list, is that this is the squad that is now finishing third in the Premier League under Michael Carrick. Carrick has done outstanding work, and the case for Carrick is real, but the players he is working with are mostly the players Ten Hag built around. The summer that everyone is so excited about, the £150m rebuild, the Tchouaméni call, the Diouf project, the Éderson breakthrough, all of it is happening on top of a squad foundation that is recognizably Ten Hag's.

If the structural argument for Carrick is that he inherited the right squad and got it firing again, that's also an argument that says the squad was already there.

The closing point

Erik ten Hag was sacked in October 2024 with United fifteen points off the top of the table and the football looking lost. The board's call to move on was, by the cold accounting of that moment, defensible. What followed (the Amorim experiment, the January reset, the Carrick rescue) has resolved the way it has resolved. United are back in the Champions League and the captain has just been named Footballer of the Year.

The version of Erik ten Hag that has been written into the public record over the past eighteen months is the version who lost the dressing room and failed to deliver. That version is not 100% wrong. It is also not the complete version.

The complete version is the manager who won the only two trophies the club has lifted in the past eight years, integrated the academy product who is currently the dressing room's emotional center, and built the spine of the squad that is right now finishing third in the Premier League.

Some of the structural failure was his. Most of it was the people above him. The piece of it that has been most consistently distorted in the public conversation is the part where, for one season at least, he got top three and a trophy at Manchester United in his first year.

Nobody else has done that since Ferguson.

In defense of Erik ten Hag. The case is more honest than the discourse.