Erik Gon Hag

Here we go again, then. Manchester United are looking for a new manager, again choosing to address one of the symptoms rather than the cause.

*Eastenders drums intensify*

Doof doof, doof doof-doof, doof-doof-doof-doof.

So another chapter ends in football’s longest soap opera, and they’re back to square one yet again. For the seventh time since Alex Ferguson announced his retirement in May 2013, Manchester United are in the hunt for a new manager after Erik Ten Hag was sacked following their 2-1 defeat at West Ham on Sunday afternoon.

In no respect whatsoever is this plot twist surprising. United have won a feeble three games out of nine in the Premier League so far this season and sit in 14th place in the table, spared only from the indignity of being closer to a relegation fight by the wretched starts to the season so far endured by the bottom three, who have still failed to win any of their nine games so far.

Things have been no better in Europe, where they are in 21st place out of 36 in the Europa League mega-phase having drawn all three of their matches so far. This is, let us quickly remind ourselves, a league format in which Tottenham Bleedin’ Hotspur are in second place having won three out of three. Needless to say, United are the only English club in these convoluted group stages to have failed to win any of their three games so far. Aston Villa beat Bayern Munich. United were held at Old Trafford by FC Twente.

This season under Ten Hag, United had become lifeless to the point of inertia. They’ve scored a grand total of eight goals in the Premier League. Only Crystal Palace and Southampton have scored fewer. And among these dismal results have come home 3-0 hidings at the hands of both Spurs and Liverpool marked by performances which demonstrated just how wide the gulf currently is between this Manchester United team and those who expect to finish in the top five or six in the Premier League this season.

This being Manchester United, of course, the timing couldn’t be much worse. They have enormous pull on account of their heft alone, of course, but the end of October is an atrocious time to be looking for a new manager. Ruben Amorim is the hot favourite to be his successor and he won the Portuguese league at the end of last season, but perhaps it’s time to step back from all of this gossip and have a think about whether changing the manager yet again is really addressing the issues within this football club.

It’s not difficult to imagine Jim Ratcliffe wondering what on earth he has let himself in for with this particular assignment. On one level, Manchester United are the second biggest football brand on this entire goddamn planet behind Real Madrid, even after more than a decade of precisely this sort of thing having happened time and time again. They’ve had six managers since Ferguson and the one who got closest to getting a tune out of them might even have been Late Stage Jose Mourinho. Ralf Rangnick’s exasperation when he left after half a season as the interim manager was palpable.

The same can be said for the players. Hundreds of millions of pounds has been spent on lavishly talented athletes, yet barely any of them have left the club in a better condition than they were in when they arrived. They let Paul Pogba run his contract down, saw him bugger off to Juventus for four years, and then spent another £89m to bring him back, only to break him.

They spent £80m on Antony, who is by all accounts a striker. He has scored precisely five Premier League goals for them over the last two and a bit seasons, and he’s only made two appearances for them from the substitutes bench so far this season. The case for saying that they break footballers is at least as strong as the case for saying that they buy broken footballers, and even that wouldn’t be saying much.

This has been going on for longer than can be ascribed to any one manager. It’s also been going on for longer than can be ascribed to any one particular group of players. It’s true to say that Alex Ferguson was an alchemist in continuing to wring silverware out of them up to 2013, but the tail-off since then has been so severe and so persistent that it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the issue could be that the institution of the club itself is rotten.

Old Trafford itself certainly is, and that’s going to be very expensive to put right. And United have been losing money hand over fist these last couple of years as their status has declined. Even if you strip away any associated commercial and sponsorship deals, failing to qualify for the Champions League costs them tens of millions of pounds every time they fail to do so. Which has now occurred six times since Ferguson slung his hook, with their chances of doing so again this season already looking strong.

It was long assumed that qualifying for this competition was the base level of expectation for any Manchester United manager under the Glazers, and this was also explicitly set as the minimum requirement—“while playing attractive football”—under Ineos. So why on earth did they allow winning the FA Cup at the end of last season distract them from this? Did they not see how pivoting from ‘Ten Hag is definitely going at the end of this season’ to ‘Ten Hag has signed a contract extension’ looked like a dreadful (to the point of cowardly) decision from the outside?

It wasn’t working. They’d just finished in their lowest league position in 1990, while their group stage elimination from the Champions League was perhaps the most chaotic that an English club had played out since that format was brought in more than thirty years ago. Who looked at them winning at the FA Cup at the end of last season alongside that broader landscape of deathly, lifeless football and thought, “Ah yes, this is the Manchester United that I want to see”?

Ruud Van Nistelrooy is the temporary replacement, though it looks at present as though the only thing stopping Amorim from arriving at Old Trafford now is the amount of money that United are prepared to pay his current employers Sporting for him. Is he the perfect man for this thankless task? Who on earth can even tell? There aren’t many options available at this time of the year, and that in itself is part of the problem.

The rot at Old Trafford is such that it feels as though it has stained every part of the club, with the women’s team apparently now an afterthought and hundreds of redundancies, while it has felt that the most plausible way to get the club back on the perch on which it feels entitled to sit would be to rip out the entire internal structure and start again from the ground up. And this is under new day-to-day management. Erik Ten Hag might have gone, but a whole host of problems remain at Manchester United, and remains as unclear as ever exactly what it is that will fix them. The soap opera will be back after a short intermission.