Meet The New Boss; Same As The Old Boss

Manchester United are sticking with Erik ten Hag, but the numbers don't add up

BBC Sport, June 9: Ex-Bayern boss Tuchel not interested in Man Utd job

Express, June 11: Man Utd manager shortlist down to one with Mauricio Pochettino 'out of the frame'

Sky Sports, June 12: Erik ten Hag to stay as Manchester United manager and is in talks to extend contract

Manchester United are retaining the services of their manager Erik ten Hag for 2024/25. As the sub-heading of the above Sky story noted: “Man Utd conclude review of the season and decide to keep Erik ten Hag, with negotiations over a contract extension said to be under way; Ten Hag's FA Cup triumph and squads injury issues understood to have been considered in review.”

It’s easy to conduct an assessment and decide to keep faith with your manager when nobody else will take the job, though, isn’t it?

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when the review was undertaken. This is supposedly the dawning of a new era at Old Trafford, with smarter people now calling the shots. How they came to decide that ten Hag’s performance merited him remaining manager is a mystery.

Let’s consider the analysis as presented by Sky. United recently won the FA Cup, thanks to a very good performance in the final against Manchester City. Yet as is so often the case for winners of that trophy, the route to English football’s showpiece occasion was a kind one for them.

As the below table shows, with teams from lower divisions marked in grey and numbered by their tier in the pyramid, it is common for a team that lifts the FA Cup to face two or three teams from outside the Premier League. Ten Hag can at least point to an away win against a top flight side, which - as the green cells denote - doesn’t happen that often.

*original venue of tie, but won in a replay (RIP)

No matter the showing in the final, it would be madness to assess a manager on his performance in cup football where the draw determines so much. A far stronger analysis can be performed via the league table, especially if we look at the underlying numbers. Here is the expected points standings for 2023/24, whereby a team is deemed to have ‘won’ the xG if it had more than 0.4 expected goals more than its opponent.

Have you found United? Keep looking. Bit lower? There they are.

The Red Devils had to overperform by a wider margin than any other side in the division in order to finish eighth. Eighth. This used to be a football team, a proper football team.

Sir Alex Ferguson would take a six which was sixth on the (less advanced) underlying numbers and win the league with it, not squeeze every drop out of the talent in both boxes to reach eighth. He must be spinning in his padded director’s box seat.

While it is unlikely that a big club would ever underachieve their xG performance by a significant margin due to the quality of player they possess, if United had done so by the same points tally by which they overachieved, they’d have been relegated last month. Let that sink in, etc.

Despite this, ten Hag is the man for Sir Jim Ratcliffe and co., apparently. They reportedly took note of United’s injury woes when making their decision, which is only fair. Per BBC Sport, the Red Devils lost the sixth most days in the Premier League this term.

On this basis, shouldn’t United have finished above Chelsea and Newcastle, who were even more afflicted? The issue with assessing the problem with this data is that it takes no account of the quality of player who was out; your third choice goalkeeper could miss the whole season but the impact upon your ability to win matches would be negligible at most.

And so we reach the main point of this article, the thing I originally intended to write about but then found United as the perfect club to frame it around: wages.

The importance of salary spend has been long-established in sport - it’s nearly 15 years since Soccernomics was published, for starters - and the following graph proves the point. Here’s how a club’s weekly wage bill compared to their points-per-match average across Europe’s big five leagues in 2023/24:

Have you found United? Keep looking. Bit lower? There they are.

They are represented by the dot closest to the £4m line on the x axis, markedly below the line of best fit. Only Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich spent more on salaries this term, with two of those clubs winning their respective league.

And this certainly highlights Bayer’s bang-for-their-buck. While not at their level, Liverpool finished third with the fifth largest wage bill; it’s far from a perfect model but if you wanted to assess a manager’s impact, as the new brains trust at United have just done, then this wouldn’t be the worst starting point.

Salary expenditure counts for nothing when a player is unavailable to play, though; the above data, from FBRef, is for a club’s entire squad. Thanks to the player wage information from the same source, we can look at the salary cost of the teams that were deployed. If we multiply a player’s time on the pitch by their weekly wage (and ignore that ‘one week’ does not equal ‘one game’) we get an idea of what it cost their club to use them. Here are the figures:

The numbers suggest it was right to acknowledge United’s fitness woes when conducting ten Hag’s end of season review, as he was only able to field the third best paid side in the division on average.

But they weren’t the eighth most highly renumerated group of players, and certainly not 14th which is where their statistical performances implied they deserved to finish. Even with United being turned down by all their managerial targets, that’s no excuse for the club not to chase ten Hag out of town. Hell, he should probably be in The Hague in his homeland for this body of work.

I’m aiming to compile this data for past seasons for a future article.