Man Utd bungle Ten Hag sack and four other Premier League summer mistakes

Yes, it’s still Manchester United and Erik Ten Hag-focused content, we’re afraid. If you didn’t want all this attention, you shouldn’t have been simultaneously the biggest club in the country and an absolute non-stop clown-show catastrof*ck. Simple.

To be fair only two-fifths of these summer mistakes are Manchester United’s, because while they are the biggest fools in the league right now, they are not the only ones.

Man United not sacking Erik Ten Hag
You have to have some sympathy with beleaguered billionaire and scourge of work-from-home skivers everywhere Sir Jim Ratcliffe here.

I mean, who could possibly have foreseen this season panning out in such a way as to suggest Erik Ten Hag maybe shouldn’t be Manchester United manager anymore?

There was quite literally no way to predict or anticipate that, apart from literally the entirety of planet earth telling him, and also Ratcliffe himself knowing it well enough to be actively sounding out potential replacements just to ensure what little was left of Ten Hag’s foundation at United was thoroughly undermined.

United even went so far as to install his likely caretaker replacement in a coaching job. Although it’s possibly best not to dwell on how well United’s attacking coach is currently getting his message across.

It would be fair to say United bungled this as much as a thing can possibly be bungled. Half-measures all over the show to get them precisely nowhere except the gnawing sense that, less than two months in, this is already another Premier League season wasted.

Ten Hag was neither backed nor sacked in the summer, with Ratcliffe – a man who has shown himself to be thoroughly ruthless when dealing with the dreary little people who work at the club – proving incapable of taking what was and remains the obviously necessary action.

It’s not a great start for a man who came to United on a wave of goodwill based entirely (and reasonably) on the fact he was neither Glazer nor Qatar. But on closer inspection, it does seem that wave was in fact a wave of lukewarm sh*t.

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Man United signing for the future, again
Not really supposed to have two from the same club with this sort of caper, but This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About and they are in such a cracked-badge crisis-club state that it seems only fair. They are the team that has most demonstrably f*cked it, at this time.

Unlike with the entirely foreseeable Ten Hag mess, there is a bit more sympathy here. We thought and kind of still do that United bought well in the summer. They certainly bought good players, which is something that hasn’t always been the case.

But what strikes us now and should probably have done so more clearly at the time is that until the moves for Matthijs De Ligt and Manuel Ugarte, they were a side doing business like all was fundamentally well.

And all was not fundamentally well. That’s now two summers in a row that United have behaved as if minor and opportunistic tinkering and securing promising talent for the long term is the order of the day, rather than acknowledge theirs is a squad in need of major surgery.

If that was slightly understandable after finishing third in Ten Hag’s first season, it’s less so now. Joshua Zirkzee and Leny Yoro are lovely signings to snaffle when you’ve got a full and functioning squad and a manager secure enough and with a clear long-term vision that he can incorporate players who may not reach their full potential until years down the line.

The injury to Yoro was massively unfortunate and unforeseeable, of course, but for all his promise he was never going to come in and instantly improve the full-strength XI because he was replacing Raphael Varane.

Zirkzee is even more a player who represents future potential, a repeat of the mistake United made with Rasmus Hojlund 12 months earlier. It’s not that any of these players aren’t any good; it’s that they weren’t what was needed at the time.

There was at least acknowledgement of this late in the window with the arrivals of De Ligt and Ugarte in particular. But they are predictably struggling to learn Our League on the fly.

United agreed personal terms with De Ligt in early July but didn’t complete the transfer until mid-August. That kind of delay isn’t all on the buying club, of course, but could there have been more urgency? Could there have been a clearer understanding of how useful it might be to have such a key signing benefiting from a decent pre-season before being chucked into the United travelling sh*tshow?

And the Ugarte deal is De Ligt with knobs on. A need that was transparently urgent all summer long – and had been for most of last season – was only addressed at the very last minute. Ugarte not only had no pre-season, but wasn’t even registered in time to feature against Liverpool, a game which went brilliantly for United.

It all points to a club that, at the very top decision-making level, really hasn’t grasped how bad things are.

Crystal Palace selling Joachim Andersen instead of Marc Guehi
We will never criticise clubs for the reality of their existence. Sure, it was a ‘mistake’ to sell Michael Olise, because Palace are much worse without him. But what are you going to do? Signing players low and selling high is how it has to be for Palace and so many other clubs who occupy similar rungs on the great football food chain.

It’s life. But there are still times when the wrong path of two feasible ones is selected, and it feels like Palace might have been guilty of that this summer.

Is Marc Guehi better than Joachim Andersen, for instance? Yes, he probably is. Is he twice as good? No, he probably isn’t.

Facetiously simplistic analysis aside, and acknowledging that timeframes and circumstance can all look very different at a couple of months’ remove, selling Andersen for £30m when they could have got double that from Newcastle for Guehi seems like an emotional rather than clear-headed business decision.

Wolves handing Gary O’Neil a fat new contract
August 9 might come to look a very significant date in recent Wolves history. On the same day Pedro Neto was sold to Chelsea, manager Gary O’Neil was handed a new four-year contract. Fair play, there was no milquetoast Man United-style half-measure with the way Wolves backed their manager, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was the right thing to do.

O’Neil was ostensibly and understandably rewarded for achieving the aim for the season: keeping Wolves in the Premier League having been handed a hospital pass following Julen Lopetegui’s late decision to sod it all for a game of soldiers.

But there was more to the story of Wolves’ season than simply avoiding relegation. Because O’Neil did such a good job initially – in such unpromising circumstances – that relegation was pretty quickly off the table as a serious concern.

That necessarily lowly season aim given the way he came into the job allowed O’Neil to get away with a horrible end to the season, and indeed be rewarded for it.

Wolves won just one and lost seven of their last 10 Premier League games in 2023/24, and that win was a narrow home victory against relegation-destined Luton. Their only other points in that run came in draws against Burnley and Nottingham Forest. So that’s five points from 10 games, and all five points secured against teams who finished between 17th and 19th in the table.

Nobody would suggest that was sacking form given what had gone before, but it should surely have given pause for thought about the wisdom of such hefty new deals for O’Neil and his staff.

That run of one win in 10 Premier League games is now one win in 16 Premier League games, with O’Neil now a clear third favourite in the Sack Race.

It’s a different kind of mistake to United’s, but as with United’s, a good part of the reason this grates is that Wolves have failed to heed lessons from their own recent history. An otherwise impressive 2021/22 season, one that included a fairly significant flirtation with European qualification, ended with a run of five points from nine games.

That too, in a fairly significant case of foreshadowing of the current situation, bled into the following season and a start that saw Wolves win just one of their first nine games of the 2022/23 Premier League campaign. And that’s a run that cost the forgettable Bruno Lage his job.

Aaron Ramsdale signing for Southampton
“Aaron, you really need to leave Arsenal and get yourself some significant first-team football. No, not like that, Aaron.”

Yes. the move was urgently needed. And apparently he’s a Southampton fan, so that’s nice. But bloody hell, man, was there really nothing else available? Did it have to be Southampton?

If the aim of the game, and it surely must be, is usurping Jordan Pickford as England’s number one, then it’s a horrible move. Pickford himself is always going to be mighty visible in Everton’s goal, negating the one advantage of playing for a relegation battler as a wannabe England keeper: that you will make lots of saves and everyone will notice you.

The problem with that is that having lots and lots of saves to make and doing a decent amount of those saves is actually the exact opposite of what is generally required of an England goalkeeper.

Ramsdale, who should really have been in a position to claim at worst the No. 2 role for England, now finds himself at a worse team than Dean Henderson and one that is at best as bad as Sam Johnstone’s.

The bald numbers are that Ramsdale has played four games for his new club, conceded 10 goals, and on Saturday gets to return to his old club for a ritual humiliation en route to adding a third relegation to his confusing CV.