Man Utd bungled every aspect of Ten Hag’s drawn-out exit, up to and including the sacking itself

Please buckle in for the steaming hot take that follows but… Manchester United have f***ed this, haven’t they?

As in, not just a little bit bungled, but f***ed in every way from start to finish. It’s been an INEOS disasterclass.

Every single element of the last six months of Erik ten Hag’s Manchester United career has been mishandled to an extent that genuinely makes you question whether those in charge at United actually have the best interests of the club at heart. It’s almost easier at this stage to believe it’s active sabotage rather than this level of incompetence. By sacking Ten Hag now, they’ve even managed to make a mess of surely the easiest part: actually doing the obviously necessary sacking they’ve been inexplicably avoiding all this time.

The most simple element at either end of this mess appears from the outside to be the placing of far too much emphasis on a pair of single results. The FA Cup win at the end of last season should not have kept him in the job; the West Ham defeat at the weekend should not have cost him it.

Neither of those results proved a single thing that wasn’t already obvious, and neither would have altered the thinking of a club with a coherent, confident strategy. If Ten Hag was the wrong man for the job (hint: he was) then a one-off win against Manchester City, however impressive, shouldn’t have been enough to alter that view.

But if you genuinely thought he was the right man to turn this sinking ship around, then a freakishly unlucky defeat at West Ham shouldn’t have changed your mind either. To sack him after a game United dominated and would have won several times over but for missed chances and then lost thanks to a widely vilified VAR nonsense in the closing moments reeks of panic.

There’s a counter-argument here that suggests making the right decision at the wrong time is still better than not making it and it may be so, but nothing about the way Sir Jim Ratcliffe and co. have handled this mess gives them much claim on the benefit of the doubt.

Given the freakish nature of the West Ham defeat itself, it’s almost impossible to draw any conclusion other than bosses simply waiting for one more defeat after the Spurs debacle to put Ten Hag out of our misery.

To sack him now, after West Ham, is to admit he was doomed from the moment Spurs sauntered disbelievingly and gratefully to the most preposterously easy win any team has enjoyed at Old Trafford in the Premier League era.

And you know what? Fair enough. That should have been enough. There should have been no way back from that. In which case, why the delay? Why not then?

This is the problem United’s ‘hell of a brains trust’ will not and cannot answer. It all comes back to the complete mishandling of the entire summer, and the outcome now is that even belatedly making a call that has been obviously correct and necessary for months looks like knee-jerk panic in the wake of the one defeat, the one negative result, for which Ten Hag genuinely did have plausible deniability.

Ten Hag himself deserves very little sympathy, because lord knows his errors are manifest and gargantuan. But he’s also been undermined at every turn by a club that has lost all sense of itself.

The very public way in which other managers were courted and entertained all summer went far beyond a due process investigation into the current set-up, with the ultimate conclusion that they had the right man in place so utterly unconvincing it must have had an impact. Even activating an extension rather than a proper new contract signalled the uncertainty.

Then there has been the recruitment on and off the field. Bringing in assistant coaches with top-level management experience is fine, but in the context of where United were it always reeked of succession planning. The optics were always terrible. What else was anyone sensible supposed to think was happening when Ruud van Nistelrooy rocked up?

And in a new-look football management set-up designed to ease pressure on the manager the opposite has relentlessly been the case. How many quotes from Ashworth, Ratcliffe or Berrada in the Ten Hag sacking statement? Precisely.

Having so thoroughly bottled the decision on the manager in the summer, United then sunk another £200m into a project they were overtly unsure about.

The great thing about United’s on-field recruitment is that while they have bought some very good players, they not only don’t seem to have been acquired with any thought as to how Ten Hag might make best use of them, but actually how any other manager might do so.

By all accounts Ruben Amorim is unfeasibly keen to come and have a go at sorting it all out. He’s a brave man, is all that can be said. It’s a reminder of just how lucky the people running United are. They have the in-built cheat code that no matter how messed up everything gets, this is still Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About and that still means something.

Make no mistake, they will be extraordinarily fortunate to be able to appoint a manager of Amorim’s class. They quite literally do not deserve him.

Again, the summer bungling has cost them. It would have been far easier to get him in the summer, surely. For one thing, he could have had some say as to how that £200m might be spent on players to suit his favoured system. For another, he wouldn’t have won nine games out of nine to have Sporting on course to retain the Primeira Liga title for the first time in decades.

There is nothing pushing him from Sporting at this moment, and the pull factors at United are greatly reduced compared to the summer.

We’re not actually sure there’s any manager with any system that appears an ideal mesh with this messy United squad, but Amorim in particular has his work cut out.

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Ten Hag discovered just how hard it was to imprint his pressing game on this squad, something Amorim himself must counter. But only after he has first worked out, among the other pressing matters in the traditional in-tray should he take this job, where the wing-backs might come from and what possible role there is in his trademark 3-4-3, with its requirement for a pair of agile and mobile deep-lying midfielders, for Bruno Fernandes. Then he also just needs to find those two agile and mobile deep-lying midfielders.

It’s a shocker of a job, really, for a manager at Amorim’s career stage. He is a young manager on the up and will bring plenty to the role that has been lacking with a clear vision and boundless charisma.

But he really is risking an awful lot at a time in his career where he needn’t. There is no sign that the good thing he’s got going on at Sporting is starting to sour – the opposite, if anything – so there is no rush. He could walk into Man City when Pep Guardiola decides he’s had enough.

We’re not going to criticise any manager for ignoring Spurs’ overtures because that’s clearly historically pretty sensible. But at least if he’d decided to make the leap into the big leagues there after the Antonio Conte unpleasantness he’d have faced less arduous expectation and found a squad at least compiled with (an albeit distinctly drearier) 3-4-3 in mind. It was a squad that even had Pedro Porro in it, for goodness’ sake.

We are huge admirers of Amorim, and can understand why United have targeted him as their preferred choice. They’ve come to that conclusion a day late and a dollar short, which means it will now require even more time and effort to make it work if indeed it can, but it’s not unreasonable to think that Amorim is better equipped than most to make the impossible possible. It’s quite likely the best idea anyone at United has had in the last six months.

What’s less clear to us, though, is why Amorim himself seems so keen to entertain it. The allure of being the man to fix Manchester United must be huge, sure, and you sort of have to admire the sheer brass balls of anyone who believes themselves capable of doing so.

But he has far more to lose than United from the arrangement, because they have already lost so very much.

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