Defeat at St James’s Park against a battered and bruised Newcastle side condemned Manchester United to another week outside the top six, and stretched the gap between themselves and the top four to five points. Turmoil has ensued in the days following, with reports surfacing that Erik Ten Hag has lost the dressing room.
That phrase feels all too familiar at Old Trafford.
Since Sir Alex Ferguson departed, how often have we seen managers at Manchester United curtailed by an internal revolt?
Revelations this week about Erik Ten Hag’s management style being ‘too demanding’ feels like Groundhog Day, and perhaps the beginning of the end for the Dutchman after one source told Sky Sports he has “lost 50% of the dressing room.”
That has prompted the club to ban several news outlets, including the Manchester Evening News.
To rub an extra sprinkle of salt in the wounds, ex-United midfielder Nemanja Matic also revealed he headed up an internal disciplinary committee, having arrived at the club to find drastically different standards to the ones he had grown accustomed to at Chelsea.
One season, Matic claims he collected £75,000 in fines and singled out the likes of Paul Pogba and Jadon Sancho – who is currently banished from Ten Hag’s plans – for consistently being late to training.
No matter how positive a given manager’s start to life at United is, the deep-rooted, rotten culture amongst the players continues to eat away and cannibalise all their promising work.
United begrudgingly march on with the same perpetual habits that have led to none of their previous five managers leaving of their own accord. We take a look back at the striking similarity between Ten Hag’s current predicament, and his predecessors who also lost the dressing room.
David Moyes’s Culinary Cull
You have to rewind a decade ago to find the initial rumblings of United’s post-Ferguson fragility.
David Moyes was destined for an uphill battle as he took over the reins from a man who had led autocratically for the better part of three decades.
Patrice Evra, a senior figure in the dressing room at this point, is said to have openly defied Moyes’s attempts to implement a stricter diet by eating a bacon roll in front of the squad.
Alexander Buttner (we forgot about him too) was also spotted stuffing his face with a plate of chips, which is said to have been the straw the broke the camel’s back in terms of team meals, leaving the likes of Rio Ferdinand questioning Moyes’s authority.
As the saying goes, he never ‘lost’ the United dressing room, but rather he never actually had it in the first place. Michael Carrick later said in 2018 that he immediately lost trust with the squad in one of his first ever team meetings after claiming ‘I can make you run more.’
Sounds awfully familiar to criticisms of Ten Hag, who is being hounded by half the dressing room for making the players ‘run too much.’
“I had to set some standards”
Erik ten Hag claims there was not a good culture among staff and players before he joined Man United 😬pic.twitter.com/DJWe42mDXY
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) December 5, 2023
Louis Van Gaal’s Heavy-Handiness
Louis Van Gaal is not one to shy away from speaking his mind, and even criticising his own players. He has that Dutch stereotype of being straight-to-the-point, and often blunt.
Following one particular mid-April afternoon in 2016 against Tottenham, Van Gaal is said to have inflicted irreparable damage between himself and his players. He singled out Marcus Rashford for drifting too far out wide and becoming ineffective – again, sounding familiar?
Players revolted by labelling him as ‘clueless’ after openly criticising players in front of the whole squad. It led to prominent members of the starting XI ignoring his emails.
Van Gaal, growing suspicious that players were growing disillusioned, had a tracker fitted so he could keep an eye on the emails, and who opened them.
For all his criticisms due to implementing a restrictive tactical framework, a young squad at the time also failed to buy into the spatial style that had worked for Van Gaal in previous roles.
There was blame to be had on both sides, but a grating clash of cultures between old and new was destined to crumble.
Jose Mourinho’s Tough Love
By the end of Jose Mourinho’s two-and-a-half-year tenure, he is said to have ‘lost 90% of the dressing room.’
At the time of his departure, headlines were dominated by his public feud with club-record signing Paul Pogba, whom he continuously benched in his final few months in charge.
This toxicity is said to have seeped into team meetings and training sessions at Carrington, with Mourinho revealing in a fascinating 2019 interview that he arrived at the club to find “players thinking they were bigger than the club.”
Amongst other things, he cited the lack of a recognised hierarchy and said a modern football club “must have a president, CEO, football director and then a manager.”
Famously, he also claimed that guiding his United team to a runners-up spot was one of the best jobs of his career, and said “I keep saying this because people don’t know what is going on behind the scenes.”
Manchester United manager’s win percentage since Sir Alex.
Erik Ten Hag – 61.4%
Jose Mourinho – 58%
Ole Solskjear – 54%
David Moyes – 52.98%
Van Gaal – 52.43%
Ralf Rangnick – 38%Trust the process. pic.twitter.com/XD9lCssENo
— ‘ (@TheShowtimeReds) December 4, 2023
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s Style, or Lack Thereof
Unlike his predecessors, United had hoped that the respect Ole Gunnar Solskjaer commanded as a former club legend might inject the necessary belief.
His relative lack of experience in the dugout, coupled with a non-existent style of play ultimately cost him his job with no silverware to show, but the dressing room revolt from senior players is as much to blame.
Solskjaer was ‘openly challenged’ by the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Nemanja Matic following a 3-2 victory over Atalanta in the Champions League group stage, by which stage all his promising work as a Premier League runner-up had unravelled.
Captaining Harry Maguire, consistently benching Donny Van De Beek, failing to incorporate Jesse Lingard back into the set-up and criticisms from the likes of Brandon Williams, Diogo Dalot and Alex Telles are all said to have contributed to his downfall.
His affable personality makes it somewhat difficult to understand how he ‘lost the dressing room,’ but it certainly wasn’t in quite the fashion as the eruptive exits of Van Gaal and Mourinho.
Wreck-it-Ralf Rangnick
Dubbed the ‘Father of Genenpress’ in his native Germany, the chief architect of the Red Bull franchise’s success across Austria and his homeland arrived at Manchester United with just 81 games of management under his belt.
There are almost too many tales to tell of the dressing being lost during Rangnick’s brief caretaker spell. Club legend Paul Scholes revealed Jesse Lingard told him the atmosphere amongst the players was a “disaster”.
Fascinating revelations were listed in a report from the Manchester Evening News – here are a few of the best quotes:
- One player claimed they “no instructions, no game plan, no position plan” and “didn’t, have a f***ing clue what they were doing.”
- One player didn’t take kindly to being spoken to “like a child” by Rangnick, and then lashed out saying he “didn’t give a s***e” what the manager said.
Upon losing 4-0 to Liverpool, Rangnick claimed their bitter rivals were “six years ahead” of United. Spoken like a true technical director – a role he was supposed to take up but didn’t when his caretaker stint ended at United – he also launched a scathing review of the state of the club.
It is perhaps the best depiction of the inner workings at United. He is quoted as saying: “You don’t even need glasses to see and analyse where the problems are.
“It’s not enough to do some minor amendments – cosmetic things. In medicine you would say that this is an operation of the open heart.
He added a similar comment to the one Mourinho said upon his own exist about the desperate need to a defined hierarchy.
“For sure [strong leadership is needed]. This is something that not just one single person as a manager can do. With all respect to Jürgen [Klopp] and Pep [Guardiola] I’m sure that they didn’t do all the things themselves.”
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