Ten Hag saga is a major black eye for Ineos at a time when United’s brand is dying | Barney Ronay
Manchester United cannot afford to carry on being this version of a football club: the history boys, a fading heritage exhibition
Well, that’s finally happened then. On, now, to the next glorious two-year plan. The last few months of Erik Ten Hag’s time at Manchester United have felt at times like a throwback to the dog days of the Soviet Union, when the Secretary of the Central Committee always seemed to be either dead or dying, wheeled out grudgingly to oversee a parade every three months, the human face of this vast, dying red bureaucracy basically a corpse in a coat propped up in front of some missiles.
As of Monday afternoon we finally have clarity. The latest man in black is no more. That frowning bald Dutchman with a way of standing on the Old Trafford touchline that conveyed a strangely tender kind of pathos, a man to whom the world is simply doing things, will now receive the large payoff governed by an utterly insane two-year contract signed this summer, at a point when he was already clearly just a pair of legs in a suit.
