Five reasons why Manchester United released Erik ten Hag

Last season, Manchester United finished eighth. They had never been lower since the breakaway Premier League was founded in 1992. In 38 games they conceded one more goal than they scored – also their worst goal in the Premier League era. The last time a Manchester United team had a negative goal difference was in 1990, when we still called it the First Division.

For a team with higher revenue than all but four other teams in the world, United almost has to actively try to be so bad in order to be so bad again. And with a new minority owner, billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, taking over the club's football operations, and Dan Ashworth (who helped rebuild England's national teams in Brighton and Newcastle) leading the way in the new front office, perhaps a seventh or sixth or even a fifth place seemed possible this season.

Well, after nine games this season, United are in 14th place. They have conceded three more goals than they have scored and have still not played against Manchester City, Arsenal or Chelsea. It's not quite United's worst start ever – in Erik ten Hag's first season they were minus-3 in nine games; In 2019, they only had 10 points in Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's first season.

In both other seasons United finished in the top four. Although we've seen them recover from situations like this, we've never seen them be this bad for so long. Now that they have sacked Ten Hag, let's go through five simple numbers that show how the club reached a new low under his leadership and why they needed to make a change.

Points

We'll start with the simplest: points per game. The Stats Perform database goes back to the 2008/09 Premier League season. Since then, United have had six full-time managers. Here's how they stack up by points per game:

Over the course of a 38-game season, an average of 1.7 points per game equals about 65 points.

In the 38-game Premier League era, Sir Alex Ferguson's teams never won fewer than 75; In Louis van Gaal's two years, 66 points was the worst; Jose Mourinho's two full seasons were never below 69; and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's minimum for the entire season bottomed out at 66.

After Ferguson's unprecedented run of success, David Moyes took over and in his only season the team averaged 1.7 points per game. He was released after 34 games. Ten Hag's teams won almost as many points – and he managed 84 Premier League games.

Goals allowed

Broadly speaking, the biggest problem of the Ten Hag era was that United seemed to let other teams score goals for fun. Here's how his defense performed compared to all managers before him:

Over the last five Premier League seasons, the tenth-placed team has allowed an average of 50.4 goals per season. In Ten Hag's two-plus seasons in the Premier League, United fared slightly worse, with a 38-game average of 50.5.

The story of why the defense was so bad is also pretty simple. They allowed more shots and better shots under Ten Hag than under any of the previous five full-time managers:

In addition, they allowed 30 opponent touches in the penalty area per game. The worst record before Ten Hag was the 21 goals conceded per game during the Solskjaer era.

Most managers are forced to make a compromise in the way they approach the defensive side of the game. Allow fewer shots by defending aggressively, but allow higher quality shots in the few cases where aggressiveness fails. Or allow a number of touches in the penalty area but limit the quality of opportunities because you have so many bodies behind the ball.

Under Ten Hag, United's defense had all the disadvantages – and none of the advantages.

Goals scored

The other, bigger tradeoff is between defense and offense. Maybe you live with a creaky defense because you're pushing so many bodies forward and scoring so many goals. We're seeing it in real time, over in Barcelona. Under Hansi Flick they press super high, live on a wafer-thin offside line and concede a lot of goals, but they score so many that it doesn't matter. They are probably the best team in the world right now because of the risks they take.

However, due to the steady defensive decline under Ten Hag, there has been no real improvement at the other end:

In Ten Hag's first two seasons, United had been somewhat lucky to finish so high. Per expected points – a metric that looks at the expected goal difference for each individual game and assigns an expected number of points to both teams – United finished sixth in the 2022-23 season and 15th last season. Of course, they finished third two seasons ago and eighth last season.

However, the one area where Ten Hag has had some bad luck is on offense. His teams scored 1.64 expected goals per game – or just shy of the joint record of 1.65 in both the late Ferguson era and the entire Solskjaer reign.

This season in particular, United's performance has been poor. The gap between their expected goals and their actual goals is the largest in the Premier League for nine games:

But even taking this subpar performance into account, United still have a negative expected goal difference this season and their expected points total still only lands in 10th place.

It's the same story when you compare it to the five United managers before Ten Hag:

Ten Hag's United scored just 50.7% of expected goals on both sides in their games. In other words, your average game ended with a coin toss for both sides.

Press

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When United announced they were signing Ten Hag from Ajax, they described him as a manager “known for his team's attractive, attacking football”. During his first pre-season with the club, Ten Hag himself said: “We want to put the pressure on, we want to put the pressure on all day and play proactive football.”

After more than two seasons, the press never appeared.

We can quantify a team's pressing intent by looking at passes allowed per defensive action (PPDA). This is the number of passes a team allows outside of its defensive third before attempting a tackle, making an interception, committing a foul or blocking a pass. Then we can also look at the opponent's percentage of pass completions allowed to see how effective the press actually is.

Under Ten Hag, United's PPDA and pass completion numbers were higher than under the previous five full-time managers:

Now, that's not a perfect comparison, as PPDA and pass completion percentage across the league have increased in the seasons we looked at. But it's not inaccurate either. After nine games this season, United's PPDA sit 15th in the league, with eight other teams allowing a lower passing rate.

possession

The core problem of the Ten Hag era was simple: they never found a way to control the ball. Every major club in the world has a plan for how they get the ball, how they keep it and how they use these two things to create scenarios during a game where they have more chances than their opponents.

While there are a handful of cases where clubs have won a lot of points without much possession – title winners Leicester City, Atlético Madrid under Diego Simeone, Inter Milan under Antonio Conte, Monaco when they all had the best prospects in the world for a year – Most modern teams create sustainable long-term success by keeping the ball away from their opponents. Ten Hag was undoubtedly considered the type of coach who wanted to do just that.

Instead, United controlled a significantly lower proportion of possession under Ten Hag than under any of the five previous full-time United managers:

Typically, most successful managers have developed a consistent sense of their team's style long before third grade; some easily recognizable things they try and some clear things they do well. The likes of Jurgen Klopp (Liverpool), Pep Guardiola (Man City) and Mikel Arteta (Arsenal) had all had their teams play a certain way before letting them play that particular way at elite level.

Not only were there no results for United, there was no evidence that they were on the way to anything. If there was some sort of strategic and stylistic idea they were working towards, it wasn't apparent. They were absolutely hopeless without the ball and never found a way to get it under Ten Hag.

Maybe they'll have better luck under the new man.