The proper time for a robust discussion about Erik ten Hag’s future was during the summer, not seven games into a new season in which he’s been handed an extended contract and £200milion worth of new players and a so-called new framework which is only weeks old.
While I am sceptical about Ten Hag’s capabilities to be a successful Manchester United manager long-term, my question to Sir Jim Ratcliffe this week is:‘What is the point of sacking him now?’
It would possibly look different had they already got that perfect replacement lined up to fit their requirements, but where are you going to find that world-class manager with the season already under way?
Thomas Tuchel? We know he falls out with everybody wherever he goes and has a raft of challenges attached to him. It’s happened to him in different places where the only common denominator is Thomas Tuchel!
I’m not excusing United’s start to the season. You don’t need to be a performance analyst guru with supposed transferable skills like Sir Dave Brailsford to look at the league table and realise 14th isn’t good enough.
Erik ten Hag was handed an extended contract by Man United over the summer but has failed to impress in the early stages of the season
Sir Jim Ratcliffe's Ineos leadership are thought to be mulling a potential replacement for him
Former Chelsea and Bayern Munich coach Thomas Tuchel is among the names floated for role
Any club of United’s stature would be investigating replacement options if the current malaise doesn’t correct itself. And should United remain outside the top 10 by Christmas, there wouldn’t even be a debate to be had, calls for the manager to go would be universal.
But barely two months into the season, why would you change the strategy you were convinced by in the summer?
As a club, United put themselves under scrutiny by conducting a well-publicised review of Ten Hag and decided he was the right man.
They may have been swayed by him winning the FA Cup, the lack of a clear and obvious alternative, and the self-belief that their new management team would be able to provide better support, improved recruitment and a degree of infrastructure to give him the coach a better platform to jump from.
Sir Jim is anything but silly. He’ll be aware his knowledge of football and specifically the real issues and challenges of United is maybe not as detailed as many people seem to think and he’ll also know in business sometimes ocean liners turn a little bit slower. In this context, United are an ocean liner and it feels very early to change.
If they’d taken radical action and removed Ten Hag in their first close season, I’d have understood - and even encouraged it. But to reverse their own decision so quickly suggests a loss of nerve. We know that although the league table looks bad, it is only a small sample size and things in football can change relatively quickly.
The brand-new players Matthijs de Ligt, Joshua Zirkzee and Manuel Ugarte are trying to find their feet at a club with shaky foundations. After one game, Ugarte has been written off as looking lost. It can’t be a surprise - he was in an entire team against Tottenham that looked lost!
Ten Hag has credit in the bank in the form of back-to-back domestic cups but has failed to convince in the Premier League
His recruiting has been heavily back but as yet Joshua Zirkzee (left) and Matthijs de Ligt (right) are yet to find their footing
United have made their bed by basing their preparations for the new campaign on having Ten Hag in charge, so they’re best-served lying in it a bit longer.
If they believe Ten Hag was the right person in the summer, they owe it to give him a little more rope, either to run with or the alternative.
As a club, United have not yet built the stability around the coach they said they were going to. Dan Ashworth and Omar Berrada are just in the building.
While my gut feeling is you should always run your business the way you think it should, United know that jettisoning their manager so soon after inviting him to stay makes them look out of control. It will be a trigger for running the gauntlet of public opinion who will see them as a bunch of calamitous clowns for reversing a big decision they took in the summer.
APT challenge was an accident waiting to happen
Whatever the eventual outcome of their case against Manchester City for the 115 charges, I think the Premier League board will need to give serious, considered and pragmatic thinking to the laws that govern the top flight and what they are actually doing to the most successful domestic football league in the world.
After their own policy on sponsorship deals was branded ‘unlawful’, it’s so bloody ridiculous that in some alternate facetious universe the Premier League should relegate themselves and form a breakaway league in disgust, such is the state of disorder.
The row between clubs about Associated Party Transactions (APTs) has highlighted the need for a new vision document from the Premier League. What they have tried to achieve is not working.
Manchester City's victory over the Premier League has exposed flaws in the league's vision
Once we opened the door to huge financial ownership models, whether American conglomerates or nation states, it was not going to work because all these economies are intertwined.
Now we have shareholder loans being categorised as APTs and thus must have some notional interest rate charges, so the very thing that in part gives the clubs sustainability and fuels development now comes at a cost to satisfy profit and sustainability rules.
By adding interest, it reduces profit and sustainability and is just stupid, but that is what the rules have now provided for. The very rules I assumed were put in place to guard against reckless spending and unmanageable and unaffordable debt levels.
This outside judging of how much a sponsorship deal is worth - challenged successfully by Manchester City - was also an accident waiting to happen.
A sponsorship deal may not reflect what the club is currently doing but if you are able to project into what the club will do in the future, it looks different. Imagine raising finance for a movie and then investors hear Tom Cruise is involved. The money becomes much bigger.
David Beckham's 2007 move to the MLS would not have been able to take place under the Premier League's regulations
At the time, Manchester City’s deals looked bigger than the achievements, but now the achievements look bigger than the deals.
City had a sponsorship price and then bought players to create the value. For someone to look at the numbers through a very narrow prism is flawed.
On that basis, the MLS wouldn’t have been allowed to pay Beckham £125million to go over there. But it provided a massive platform for the league to leap off and become a far more compelling commercial proposition.
Despite not liking the way City went about it, I always thought the APT argument was possibly going to fall in their favour. My bigger concern is for the game itself.
Football needs to be careful and get itself together otherwise an independent regulator run by political appointees at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport - or the ministry of non-entities as I like to call them - may just be a particularly nasty over-reaching experience.
I originally backed Financial Fair Play because I thought it would control player wages and inflation in the game. It hasn’t done that - all it’s done is protect the cartel of clubs who were already there. That can’t be what the sport is about.
Cole Palmer has been outstanding for Chelsea but there's no need to shoehorn England's stars into one ultimately incompatible side
England should remember, there's no I in team
At different times, there has been an outcry to build the England team around Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden and now Cole Palmer. Here’s a novel plan: Why do we need to build it around anybody? England are not a one-man team. We have a plethora of talent.
I hope all our stars can shine but let’s not get into the old conversation of trying to shoehorn Paul Scholes, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard into the same XI. If any individual doesn’t work in the team format, don’t play them. I hope Lee Carsley picks players because he wants them, not because he feels he has to.