Erik ten Hag has reportedly held on to his position as Manchester United manager after the club’s executives discussed the team’s dire start to the new Premier League season during an extensive meeting on Tuesday.
United have only collected eight points from seven top-flight matches and have scored just five goals – the club’s lowest tally at this stage of a season since 1972. Some reports even suggested that United’s hierarchy had decided to sack Ten Hag before May’s FA Cup final – although those potential plans were scrapped after the Red Devils secured an unlikely victory over Manchester City in the Wembley showpiece.
A dismal 3-0 defeat to Tottenham at the end of September reignited rumours of Ten Hag’s imminent exit, but the noises out of United’s hierarchy have regularly maintained that the club would be very reluctant to sack the Dutchman just three months after triggering a one-year extension in his contract.
Ten Hag‘s future was the main item on the agenda of the board meeting which took place at INEOS’s London offices on Tuesday, stretching from 11.30am until the early evening. It was decided that Ten Hag would remain at the helm, according to The Times.
Club chairman Sir Jim Ratcliffe had already had this meeting pencilled in the calendar as part of a monthly catchup, but it took on added importance following the team’s wretched form. INEOS’s long-serving director sport, Sir Dave Brailsford, was joined by summer recruits; Omar Berrada, the club’s CEO, sporting director Dan Ashworth, and technical director, Jason Wilcox at the six-hour summit in Kensington.
Ratcliffe, United’s largest single majority shareholder who acquired sporting control of the club after making his £1.25bn investment in February, insisted that he would defer to his new-look executive team regarding Ten Hag’s future earlier this week. “I like Erik,” Ratcliffe claimed, “I think he’s a very good coach but at the end of the day it’s not my call.”
