Manchester United wasted 115 days before firing Erik ten Hag: The delay will make repairing the damage harder

So ends as fruitless a 115 day period as any for a club who is supposed to operate at the upper echelon of the Premier League. When the much vaunted new executive team, the supposed best in class who were about to put the good ship Manchester United back on course towards adequacy, concluded that Erik ten Hag’s contract must be extended, did they really believe they’d get much further down the line than late October? If so they were in a vast minority.

It is at least debatable whether they actually did believe Ten Hag would get much further down the line. After all, spending weeks scouring Europe for anyone you might fancy more is hardly a ringing endorsement of your incumbent’s qualities. Thomas Tuchel is known to have held discussions with minority owners INEOS. Gareth Southgate had his admirers, per CBS Sports sources. Thomas Frank of Brentford is another name understood to have been on United’s radar then and now.

If the right man wasn’t available there is a compelling case for holding on to what you have, the managerial equivalent of Liverpool waiting on Virgil van Dijk’s availability. Word from within the club is that United wanted to see how Ten Hag faired in what they expected to be a better, more organised structure. Again, a noble vision. What none of that ought to compel the club to do is extend the incumbent’s contract by a year, tying themselves to a stuttering manager until 2026.

Less than four months after that announcement, with just 13 games played, United have a sizeable contract to pay off. The terms of Ten Hag’s exit agreement are unknown, but he is understood to have been earning just under $12 million a year. A club that reported a loss of nearly $150 million for the 12 months up to June 30 has loaded its balance sheet with a much bigger hit than necessary, the sort that will swallow up a large chunk of the cash due to be saved by the cost, and job, cutting measures instituted by the new management team.

The balance sheet troubles don’t end there. Recommitting to Ten Hag on his current contract meant allowing him to keep the veto on transfer matters that they had afforded him when he arrived from Ajax in 2022. The ceaseless argument of this current tenure was just how much sway the manager had on recruits that were so frequently plucked from the Eredivisie. Ten Hag’s own agent, Kees Voss, was heavily involved in deals made in the summer of 2023. A year later his defense was to insist that signings such as Matthijs De Ligt, Noussair Mazrouai and Joshua Zirkzee had been collective decisions.

Whether these were signings championed by the manager is rather beside the point. They were evidently additions that fit into a profile established by a manager who had hung on by a thread. Ruud van Nistelrooy and the eventual permanent successor are going to have to work out what to do with a center forward who doesn’t get goals, a center back whose immobility was routinely exposed at Juventus and Bayern Munich and the collection of mixed talent with whom United had drifted away from the top six. Even for a club of their means, loading up the roster and balance sheet at a time when their footballing identity had not been set — either by the manager or those above him — seems an almighty waste.

What did those 115 days do for United? Enough damage that this season is shaping up to be much the same wasted year as 2021-22 or 2018-19, years when a caretaker had enough time to establish that yes, indeed, the guy before really had made a pig’s ear out of all this. The new regime were much swifter in dispensing with Ten Hag than the Glazers had been in moving on Jose Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. Then again, they are as far back from the top four with notably fewer games played, seven points from fourth, seven points from 18th. What improvement there has been this season is hardly so profound to suggest that it would take anything less than an act of coaching genius to propel United into a serious push for Champions League qualification through the Premier League.

This team has spent a year and change playing what might generously be described as midtable football — by the end of last season they were giving up a relegation worthy 1.7 non-penalty expected goals a game. These nine games have seen their ordinariness calcify, a team that doesn’t quite have the same disastrous xG profile it had a year ago now settling into one of the Premier League’s most average. A run at the Europa League already feels like the most plausible route back into the Champions League.

In what might feel like the blink of an eye, United have frittered away a great deal of cash and set themselves up to do much the same over the remainder of the 2024-25 season. As the Old Trafford hierarchy hunt for the manager they couldn’t find in the summer they should know one thing, it will take longer than 115 days to address the damage that has been done since Ten Hag signed his extension.