Tommy Martin: United have been lost in the chase but have they found their alpha-nerd?

Manchester United are continuing with the only task in which they can make themselves appear world class: the pursuit of managers.

Ajax coach Erik ten Hag gestures from the sidelines during the Dutch Eredivisie football match between FC Twente and Ajax. Picture: Getty Images

As if to confirm that the universe is a zero-sum equation, that all the positive energies being discharged in one place must be matched by negative energies elsewhere, that every glorious yin must have its rubbish yang, on the same weekend as Manchester City v Liverpool, you also had Everton v Manchester United.

That the two clubs involved in Saturday’s El Craptico at Goodison Park are the respective city rivals of Sunday’s starring duo lent a further sense of grotesque mirror imagery. Where Sunday was compelling and slick, Saturday was clumsy and hapless. At the Etihad the talk was of high lines and marauding full backs; at Goodison it was of deflections and disgrace, the word United keeper David De Gea used to describe his team’s performance.

Both occasions also left contrasting post-match images: Pep Guardiola grabbing Jurgen Klopp for the most enthusiastic of bro hugs; Cristiano Ronaldo smashing a child’s phone in a fit of ill-advised pique. One spoke of mutual admiration, the other of spiteful petulance.

It did not need losing to Everton, a team so shambolic as to have been publicly trolled by Sean Dyche three days previously, to reveal United’s fallen place in the pecking order. Nor is it just they who are locked out of City and Liverpool’s high-pressing pas de deux.

The collegiate exchange between Klopp and Guardiola might have been a bit different had one of them actually lost the game, but the vibes between the pair have lately been those of lovers for whom the rest of the world has ceased to exist. The league table only shows what they themselves feel, that they are together alone.

Klopp spoke before the game of how he might like to meet up with Guardiola after they are retired, when all this is over, to drink a beer and talk of games gone by. The gusto with which Guardiola embraced his rival on Sunday was a declaration of affection for the only coach who will hold his stare, the only one who doesn’t turn up with two banks of five, who doesn’t seek to pour sand in his trumpet.

These are the defining football personalities of their era, men of their time. No longer is the touchline ruled by charismatic working-class heroes, whose skill lay in parlaying those defining 20th-century themes, war and industry, into values that produced success. Klopp and Guardiola have thrived in a different world, one so systemised and digitised as to require the skills of a technocrat, but one in which people still seek a leader with a big idea to believe in.

These are the alpha-nerds and they rule the world now.

While all this was happening, Manchester United were continuing with the only task in which they can make themselves appear world class: the pursuit of managers. Not the actual hiring of managers, to be clear, which clearly has not worked out well recently.

The pursuit of managers is different. When you are looking for a manager you can appear as imperious as United once did on the field. You can strut around the global game eyeing up coaching potential like a discerning art dealer considering the works of the Uffizi. So, you get these briefings to press about how the United hierarchy are mulling over the credentials of Luis Enrique or are casting a cold eye on Mauricio Pochettino’s Champions League exit with PSG.

These chancers, marketing men and widget-floggers, long-term specialists in the art of simply not getting it, can pretend for a while that they are sagacious and calculating, hard-nosed fund managers looking for the next lucky unicorn. They love this process so much that they appointed an interim coach to allow them to do it for longer: evaluating, assessing, turning data spreadsheets upside down as if they have any idea what they are looking at.

And so they appear to have alighted on Erik Ten Hag, one of the two names strongly linked to the job when Ole Gunnar Solksjaer was sacked last November. No matter - United have used the five months since to further run down their already-depleted stocks of self-respect. Ralf Rangnick has brought the substitute teacher effect to their entitled dressing room, the inevitable sense of lunatics controlling the asylum, expensively-assembled monkeys banging away on typewriters promising Shakespeare.

In their efforts to join that golden circle in which their two great rivals exist, at least it appears that in Ten Hag they have found their nerd. Every new manager announcement brings with it background information about trade secrets – 3am training sessions! Nietzsche! Salsa dancing! – but Ten Hag sounds like a proper Guardiola-level boffin.

Even in his first coaching job, as Steve McClaren’s assistant at FC Twente, Ten Hag was already in deep. “We were starting pre-season training the day after I was appointed,” Steve McClaren told The Athletic. “He brought out this folder, and there was six weeks’ worth of pre-season training planned in there. Every minute of every day was laid out, from drinks sessions to warming down, to individual work. It was so detailed. I’d not seen anything like it before, and I’ve not seen anything like it since.” 

Since then, he has developed a reputation for the same attention to detail that has made Klopp and Guardiola best-in-class, though perhaps with more of the latter’s wired intensity. For example, he spent the flight home from Ajax’s famous Champions League win over Real Madrid in 2019 studying videos of Fortuna Sittard for their next league game.

Can the nerd join the ranks of the alpha-nerds?

The focus on the two charismatic managers distracts from the fact that everything is laid on for Klopp and Guardiola behind the scenes, as it was for Ten Hag at Ajax. Liverpool have their data algorithms and FSG’s hard-nosed sports business acumen. City have their former Barcelona executives, their expanding football empire and their lawyers if you start asking too many questions.

We know that United is nothing like that. In fact, the prevailing culture at Old Trafford, with the towel-snapping contest about the captaincy, the sniggering about Rangnick and his coaches and the overall mood of shrugging petulance, is that of the alpha-nerd’s eternal, sworn enemy: the dumb jock.

Yin, time to meet yang.