In the hours before Manchester United played Liverpool on September 1 last year, chief executive Omar Berrada and sporting director Dan Ashworth sat down with journalists in the Old Trafford boardroom to discuss the transfer window and start to the season under Erik ten Hag.
It was the first time senior executives had publicly discussed Ten Hag’s situation since Ineos had touted his job to a long list of candidates before United’s rousing victory over Manchester City in the 2024 FA Cup final and then given the Dutchman a stay of execution and a new contract during a summit meeting in Ibiza.
Asked if Ten Hag still had their support were results to turn bad, Berrada replied: ‘Absolutely. We think Erik is the right coach for us and we’re fully backing him.
‘We have worked very closely together in this transfer window. We’re going to continue working very closely with him to help him get the best results out of the team.’
There was no fault on Berrada’s part. It was a loaded question and what was he meant to say? No, we’re not backing the manager?
But any football club owner, chairman or chief executive knows they become a hostage to circumstance the moment the infamous vote of confidence leaves their lips.
Liverpool won comfortably 3-0 at Old Trafford that day and Ten Hag was toast 10 games later despite losing only two of them.
Nine games after that, Ashworth followed him out of the door, practically frogmarched through the press room at Old Trafford with a P45 in his back pocket.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe inherited Ten Hag so there was never any great loyalty to the Dutchman. But Ashworth was most definitely part of the Ineos revolution, so let’s not doubt for one second the ruthlessness of a man who earned a reputation for it long before he paid £1.3billion to buy into United.
Which brings us to Ratcliffe’s comments to The Business podcast in which he not only backed Ten Hag’s successor Ruben Amorim but boldly claimed that he would give his Portuguese head coach three years to prove himself in the job.
‘He has not had the best of seasons,’ Ratcliffe conceded. ‘Ruben needs to demonstrate he is a great coach over three years. That’s where I would be. You can’t run a club like Manchester United on knee-jerk reactions.’
One suspects Ashworth’s non-disclosure agreement prevents him from disputing the latter claim.
So here we are again. The autumn leaves have hardly hit the floor, United have made another stuttering start to the season, and Liverpool are next up after the international break.
Given that Amorim has taken 37 points from 34 Premier League games in charge – a significantly worse record than Ten Hag and indeed any United manager since Sir Alex Ferguson retired – not to mention going out of the Carabao Cup to Grimsby, it is quite a statement by Ratcliffe.
We had a flavour of it after United lost at Brentford 12 days ago when Ineos sources said their billionaire owner backed Amorim and was prepared to give him the rest of the season. The mood at United was a little more restrained, with insiders saying that no replacements had been lined up and everything else was speculation.
We will never know whether Amorim would have survived a fourth defeat in seven league games this season because United beat Sunderland convincingly last weekend, but there was no pushback to reports he might not.
Ratcliffe’s comments suggest emphatically that he would have kept his job, but the podcast raised the fascinating scenario that the Glazers could have stepped in and overruled the minority owner. ‘It’s not going to happen,’ replied Ratcliffe curtly.
Elsewhere in the podcast, he justified the decision to make 450 redundancies and wide-ranging cost cuts on the basis that he needs to turn United into a profit-making enterprise again and invest more money in the first-team.
Which begs the question, would Ratcliffe’s nerve hold if United were to skirt close to the bottom three again, as they did last season, and the unthinkable prospect of relegation?
They finished 15th thanks to a last-day win over Aston Villa, having blown the thick end of £100m by losing the Europa League final to Tottenham and failing to qualify for the Champions League or indeed any European competition for only the second time in 35 years after the worst season in the club’s history for more than half a century.
Like any owner, would Ratcliffe be quite so bold if the bottom line suffers and the fans turn?
Talk is cheap. Wanting to give Amorim three years is one thing, but looking even three weeks ahead seems optimistic right now for a United team who are the antithesis of consistency. The Liverpool game is followed by Brighton at home and then trips to Nottingham Forest and Spurs.
No journalist in the boardroom last September wanted Ten Hag to be sacked, any more than they want to see the back of Amorim now. This is a club crying out for continuity and normality.
But for Ratcliffe to give him a three-year pass is as ridiculous as it is wrong. Just ask Ange Postecoglou, who lost his job at Tottenham despite outwitting Amorim in that Europa League final in Bilbao and is now under pressure after just seven games at Nottingham Forest.
No manager gets three years these days if the results continue to go against him, and neither will Amorim.
