How Being Manchester United Manager Became the Hardest Job in Football

“I’m not naive, I know it’s going to be very different, very difficult.”

That opening gambit of Ruben Amorim’s first press conference as Manchester United manager summed up what has become the toughest assignment in world football.

After his first year at Old Trafford, grizzled veteran of the coaching game Jose Mourinho described his maiden campaign as ‘probably my most difficult season as a manager.’

Louis van Gaal, another with a stellar career in the beautiful game, came over very diplomatic in a press conference towards the end of his tawdry time at the club.

“As a manager, you know in advance it’s a big challenge and the club is in a transition, but you don’t know in advance the difficult moments.”

David Moyes, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Erik ten Hag are the other permanent head coaches to have been sacked by Manchester United in the post-Alex Ferguson era, and if you asked them they too would no doubt speak of the challenges that managing the Red Devils brings.

The truth is that Manchester United, from a commercial standpoint at least, are one of the biggest clubs in world football. Much of their fanbase was raised on a diet of non-stop success during Ferguson’s tenure, in which the club won 13 Premier League titles, the Champions League twice and the domestic cups on nine different occasions combined.

The club’s owners, the Glazer family, are detested in some quarters of Old Trafford, but there’s no doubt that they have supported their managers financially in the transfer window….it’s just that their business in the market has often been less than spectacular.

And so there’s this peculiar standoff between high expectations amongst pundits and the club’s fanbase, and the rather more tepid reality of their performances on the pitch.

So how have things gotten so bad for Manchester United? And why is managing them the hardest job in football?

A Timeline of Failure

It was a seismic moment for Manchester United when Sir Alex Ferguson decided to retire at the end of the 2012/13 season.

Not only is the most successful manager in English football history, but Ferguson served the Red Devils for some 27 years – in any workplace, replacing such a long and valued servant is a very difficult assignment indeed.

David Moyes: July 2013 to April 2014

That task initially fell to something of a Ferguson imitator in David Moyes, a dour, pragmatic Scot that enjoyed a decent reputation having typically achieved beyond their means with Everton.

But there was a problem. United won the title in Ferguson’s last season, which automatically meant that the pressure was on Moyes to replicate that feat in 2013/14.

“Your job now is to stand by our new manager”

Sir Alex Ferguson after David Moyes was appointed as Manchester United manager. pic.twitter.com/BrcAzQBO8h

— Sky Sports Retro (@SkySportsRetro) April 21, 2022

However, this was not a vintage Red Devils side. They had shipped 43 league goals on their way to the title, and only three of their players reached double figures for goals scored in all competitions – of them, Robin van Persie had a somewhat anomalous campaign in which he scored 30+ times for what would be only the second, and last, time of his career.

Michael Carrick was by now 33, while Rio Ferdinand, Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs had turned 35, 39 and 39 respectively. And so Moyes, already facing a tough job in his first season as Manchester United job, was also tasked with overseeing a transition of a chunk of the playing squad.

Moyes was only allowed to bring in two new faces – Juan Mata and Marouane Fellaini, so it’s no big surprise that United’s performances on the pitch regressed markedly.

“We just didn’t make good enough signings in my first transfer window,” Moyes would later admit.

“Marouane Fellaini was signed right on deadline day and in truth, in terms of the signings I wanted, we had a terrible window.”

In a sense, Moyes was destined to fail, and by April 2014 United were languishing in seventh place in the Premier League table; not only had they failed to defend their title, but United had also not qualified for the Champions League for the first time in nearly two decades.

And so, after just ten months in the Old Trafford dugout, Moyes was gone.

Louis van Gaal: July 2014 to May 2016

The club’s board went in a different direction with Moyes’ successor. Louis van Gaal had won league titles in three different countries with Ajax, Barcelona and Bayern Munich, and so he was exactly the kind of winner that United needed following the debacle of 2013/14.

The Dutchman was well supported in the transfer market too, splashing out £160 million in his first window – on the likes of Angel Di Maria, Ander Herrera and Luke Shaw, plus a further £130 million in his second season; Anthony Martial, Memphis Depay and Morgan Schneiderlin amongst those signing on the dotted line.

BREAKING: Angel Di Maria has completed his move to #mufc for a British record fee of £59.7m. #WelcomeDiMaria pic.twitter.com/ySiDmJM0gD

— Manchester United (@ManUtd) August 26, 2014

Van Gaal had added quality to United’s squad and lowered the average age considerably, and with his pedigree of success, the club was surely heading back to the big time.

Right?

It wasn’t long before the cracks began to emerge, with Van Gaal claiming he inherited a ‘broken’ squad from Ferguson and Moyes. But things went okay in the Dutchman’s first season, with United finishing fourth – an improvement on the seventh place of the previous campaign.

Bands often cite their second album as being the hardest, and Van Gaal’s sophomore year at Old Trafford had similar echoes. Between October 25 and the end of 2015, United won just two of the ten Premier League games they played….and the writing was on the wall.

They kept faith with Van Gaal, and while results did improve – and United would also go on to lift the FA Cup – they would limp to a fifth place finish, outside of the Champions League places once more.

To make matters worse, it was leaked into the press that after a slanging match at half-time of a 0-3 loss to Tottenham in April 2016, some United players had called Van Gaal ‘clueless’ to his face.

Once you lose the dressing room, you generally lose your job thereafter. And so it was that Van Gaal was given the bullet at the end of that 2015/16 campaign.

The One That Got Away?

Jose Mourinho is very much the Marmite man of football management.

Some love the yeasty extract, whereas others can’t stand it, and the problem with being such a polarising character is that you need to keep your fans on side….or else.

A proven Premier League winner, Mourinho was in that sense a closer resemblance to Ferguson than Moyes or Van Gaal. But the Portuguese boss, both in 2016 and today, has lost the youthful vigour and charisma that once saw him declare himself to be the ‘Special One’.

His brand of football had also changed since his glory days with Chelsea, and it remained to be seen how the Old Trafford faithful took to his rather conservative style.

Once again, the new boss was supported in the transfer window. Mourinho made the eye-catching signing of Paul Pogba in his first season for £88 million, while an outlay of more than £160 million brought Romelu Lukaku and Alexis Sanchez – amongst others – to the club.

On paper, it looked like United could challenge for the Premier League title once more with proven pedigree on the pitch and in the dugout. But the reality….

The Red Devils lost just five games during the 2016/17 Premier League campaign, but they also drew 15 – too many to mount a title challenge, and United ended up finishing in sixth.

But they did win the Community Shield, the League Cup and the Europa League, and so Mourinho was given more time to improve upon United’s Premier League performance.

And he delivered exactly that: second place in 2017/18 was United’s best season in the post-Ferguson era by a country mile, while a run to the FA Cup final suggested that Mourinho, despite some murmurings of discontent, had taken the club forward.

It was poor start to 2018/19 that would cost Mourinho his job; seven wins in seventeen Premier League games enough to convince the Glazers that enough was enough; particularly as the Portuguese boss was becoming increasingly involved in moments of controversy during games and in press conferences.

But you wonder if they should have some Mourinho more clemency. Here’s a look at the win rates of all Manchester United managers in the post-war era:

Win Rates of Manchester United Managers

Although stats don’t always tell the story within the story, in terms of the sheer numbers Mourinho is the second most-successful manager in United’s modern history.

It’s true that Sir Matt Busby, battling the most challenging conditions, delivered more silverware, while Ron Atkinson matched Mourinho’s haul of three trophies, but in terms of winning games only Ferguson delivered more than the Portuguese.

Weight of Expectation

Managing a club with the history and heritage of Manchester United brings with it a certain weight of expectation; even if they’ve been struggling for success for more than a decade now.

In addition to that, spending big in the transfer windows also heaps on expectation too; ultimately, if you’re going to talk the talk with a big-name signing or two, you need them to walk the walk in order to keep you in a job.

And it’s that psychology that underpins the relative failure of both Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Erik ten Hag, the successors to Mourinho, as Manchester United manager.

The graphic below plots two ranks alongside one another. The white line shows where United ranked in the Premier League in terms of transfer spending that season, i.e. the highest-spending club is ranked one, the lowest 20th and so on.

The red line, meanwhile, reveals where United actually finished in the Premier League table that term.

Solskjaer’s first full season in charge was 2019/20, and boy did the Glazers take an almighty gamble handing the inexperienced Norwegian a £196 million war chest, which he splashed on Harry Maguire – making him the most expensive defender in football history, Bruno Fernandes, Aaron Wan-Bissaka and Daniel James.

United were the most extravagant spenders of the 2019/20 window, and they did at least get some kind of return: a third-place finish was the best of the post-Ferguson era, bar from Mourinho’s excellent 2017/18.

The Old Trafford faithful were fully behind Solskjaer then, although the chaotic fear that the global health emergency struck through the heart of football no doubt impacted the Red Devils.

With no fans to pump money into the coffers, the Glazers cut back on their spending; Solskjaer was given a relatively paltry £70 million to spend in 2020/21, and half of that was wasted (it’s a fair word, given the player’s output) on Donny van de Beek.

Despite that tightening of the belt, United – with the ninth highest budget that term – would go on to finish second in the Premier League table, which reinforced the notion that Solskjaer was doing a good job.

But the start to the 2021/22 season was catastrophic. The Glazers handed Solskjaer the second-largest budget in the EPL, which he splashed on Jadon Sancho, Raphael Varane and one Cristiano Ronaldo, who received a hero’s welcome on his return to Old Trafford.

However, things did not go swimmingly on the pitch. By November, United were down in seventh place, and in the space of just a few weeks they lost in the Manchester derby and conceded four goals against both Leicester City and Watford – in amongst which they were thrashed 0-5 by bitter rivals Liverpool.

In truth, the Glazers had no choice but to sack Solskjaer; if they hadn’t, there would have been an almighty revolt inside Old Trafford.

All of which, after a brief experiment with Ralph Rangnick as interim boss, ushered in the tortured era of Ten Hag.

Erik ten Haag

The Dutchman’s reign was similar to that of his compatriot Van Gaal; he found out quickly that, no matter how much money he spent, that the Total Football style of Ajax totally wasn’t going to work at Old Trafford.

The Glazers gave Ten Hag an almighty £200 million to spend in his first season, of which £137 million went on the immobile Casemiro and the hapless Anthony. Perhaps the writing was on the wall from the get-go.

📞 Calling: @Antony00 🇧🇷

Welcome to United ❤️ #MUFC

— Manchester United (@ManUtd) September 1, 2022

The United fans simply never took to the Dutchman, and as you can see from the image above, his extravagant spending was never matched by similar levels of success on the pitch.

Despite a handy third place finish in 2022/23, it was all downhill from there in 2023/24; United would finish the campaign with a minus goal difference in eighth place, some 31 points behind their Manchester rivals.

To somehow make matters worse, this was the very same season that United fans celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of 1993/94, in which they won the Premier League title and the FA Cup as well as reaching the final of the League Cup.

When you compared where United had been with where they were now, Ten Hag – like his predecessors in the post-Ferguson era – had failed to take the club forward.

Changing Lanes

It’s perhaps time for Manchester United fans to accept that there’s a new normal in the Premier League; a ‘big three’ of Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool. At the time of writing, they are lightyears behind their elite rivals.

You can hardly blame the club’s owners if they started to dampen their own expectations. In the eleven seasons played since 2013/14 – the first of the post-Ferguson era – they have been either the biggest, or second biggest, spenders on transfer fees in six of those campaigns.

Their reward? A pair of second-place finishes, at best.

Maybe there’s an argument to say that United’s scouting and recruitment team simply hasn’t been good enough; the Glazers have thrown hundreds of millions at solving their club’s ills, and yet only a handful of their 2024/25 squad could be described as being high-class operators.

Quality head coaches are able to get the very best from even an ordinary set of players, so it will be interesting to see if a manager – Amorim or anybody else – can come in and get everybody singing from the same hymn sheet.

Because what is clear is that if United continue to fail on the pitch, their commercial viability – achieved through merchandise sales around the globe and partnerships with big businesses – will also surely face a downturn.

And when that happens, they won’t be able to spend big on players… which could precipitate another downward spiral.

United have to get their next managerial appointment right, or potentially face decades in the doldrums.