Erik ten Hag has gone, but his shadow looms over English football still. The mistake was understandable enough: high on the euphoria of beating Manchester City in the FA Cup final, Manchester United renewed his contract. Three months into the new season, more than £180m spent on summer transfers, Ten Hag was dismissed with United 14th in the table on 11 points from nine games.
The sporting director, Dan Ashworth, and various members of Ten Hag’s backroom staff also left, at a total cost of £14.5m. Or, to put it another way, keeping Ten Hag cost United £200m and in effect undermined this season. Nobody wants to be caught in the Ten Hag trap.
No two cases are ever exactly alike. There is a tendency always to overcorrect on a simplistic understanding of what went before, which is why so many clubs flip-flop between idealistic dreamers and dour pragmatists – the fat pope, thin pope model of history.
Even by United’s recent standards, the decision to stick with Ten Hag was bungled: openly talking to other candidates inevitably erodes confidence in the incumbent. But, equally, every club owner or director is aware of the Ten Hag trap and the need to avoid it. For a few years yet it’s going to be harder for a manager to save their job by winning a trophy and that is of direct relevance to both Ange Postecoglou and Ruben Amorim.
The threat to Amorim is, as yet, theoretical, although as the example of Sir Ben Ainslie with Ineos’s sailing team demonstrates, Sir Jim Ratcliffe has a capacity to be ruthless. He will dismiss a high-profile figure just as readily as he will scrap a packed lunch, stewards’ bonus or pensioner concession. The case against Amorim, anyway, is largely that his football is not a fit for the squad and it would be cheaper and easier to replace the ideologue in the dugout than an entire dressing room of players.
The ecstatic end to Thursday’s Europa League quarter-final against Lyon bolsters his position. As Rory McIlroy’s victory at the Masters last Sunday showed, sport is at its best when it blends the anxious and hapless with the brilliant to produce an impossibly dramatic denouement. Those final minutes at Old Trafford, Kobbie Mainoo and Harry Maguire cast into emergency service as central forwards and both producing exceptional finishes, will be remembered for decades in the way a routine 2-0 win simply wouldn’t have been. Fans will forgive a lot of frustration for an experience like that – even if it is dependent on fallibility.
In that sense, Thursday’s win could be for Amorim what Liverpool’s 4-3 victory over Borussia Dortmund was in the Europa League quarter-final in 2016, a game that did not lead to immediate success but did act as confirmation of the Jürgen Klopp project. The only caveat is that, for United, much the same could be said about the 4-3 win over Liverpool in the FA Cup quarter-final last season, and it turned out Amad Diallo’s extra-time winner was simply a lure on the way into the Ten Hag trap.
The case of Postecoglou is more perilous. It is entirely plausible that Tottenham win the Europa League and the Australian still leaves the club, while United stick with Amorim having won nothing. But Thursday was a good night for Postecoglou, Tottenham’s most impressive away performance since the 4-0 win at Manchester City in November. It’s perhaps not ideal that their idea of defending is apparently reliant on having a player with the freakish pace of Micky van de Ven but, on the other hand, they do, at the moment, have a player with the freakish pace of Micky van de Ven.
The difficulty of winning at Deutsche Bank Park should not be underestimated – Spurs were only the fourth away side to do so this season of 21 who have tried – but equally Tottenham’s annual expenditure on wages is around three times that of Eintracht Frankfurt. That is no guarantee of success, but it does fit the theory that Postecoglou’s ultra-aggressive football works when, as in Scotland with Celtic, his side has an advantage of resource. That superiority will be even more pronounced in the semi-final against Bodø/Glimt.
That shouldn’t devalue any success Tottenham may have, but it does perhaps place it into context. It is possible to mount a defence of Postecoglou on the grounds that injuries, particularly to the back four, ripped the heart out of the season, damaging confidence, and that, by the time a measure of stability was regained, the league campaign was already meaningless. But it’s also true that once the opening 10-game spurt was over, there has been little evidence of him having an aptitude for the Premier League.
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Spurs are a club defined by their yearning for success, yet the only manager to win them a trophy in the past 26 years, Juande Ramos, was sacked eight months after that 2008 League Cup win with the club bottom of the Premier League – an extreme example of the Ten Hag trap. As José Mourinho is never reluctant to remind people, Spurs sacked him six days before the League Cup final in 2021.
The lack of silverware haunts Spurs and yet the club have a complicated relationship with it. It may even be that the best thing for a manager wanting a lengthy career at Tottenham is a very specific form of failure, one that prioritises Champions League qualification and its budgetary benefits over the more tangible achievement of trophies.
Perhaps that is simply, once again, to point out the twin impulses that guide football and the friction that exists between them: routine wins and control may offer consistency and please the executives, but the visceral stirrings that animate fans come from nights such as Thursday at Old Trafford, the sort of nonsense and drama that scorns careful financial projections, or, indeed, any sort of planning at all.
Executives will always favour reliability. Nobody ever built a successful business on unlikely players doing unlikely things at unlikely times; fans may delight in the flailing limbs of three goals after the 114th minute, but they mean less to the bottom line than consistency. And that is all the more pertinent given how aware everybody is of the need to avoid the Ten Hag trap.
