He’s obviously done well since he’s come in in that he’s stopped the rot, ended the laughing stock style drubbings, got them looking like a shoe in for the top 4 and has now won them a trophy, none of which were the case when he came in a year ago.
All of that said, although none of the above were present at the end of Solskjaer’s (or Mourinho/Van Gaal’a tenure,) they were all present at some stage during each of them with the exception of trophies in Solksjaer’s case due to narrowly losing a cup final and a few semi finals, Ten Haag hasn’t actually achieved anything that his predecessors were unable to.
The media will be hyping him up as the second coming of Ferguson because it generates click, either will people agreeing or disagreeing, but the reality is he has a long way to go to prove he’s any better than what came before him, let alone being the best manager in the world. People will write off the League Cup win on the basis that they had a soft draw, which is true, but if it was us I’d be pointing to the league position, the fact they’ve just knocked Barcelona out of the Europa League and more broadly that you’d have to say there’s a fair chance that they’ll add to that trophy tally this season. He’s clearly done well, but as I said, there’s a long way to go to suggest that it will genuinely improve on what’s gone before, the year of Van Gaal leaving/ Mourinho joining, for example, had them winning the FA Cup, Europa League and League Cup before it all then went to shit.
As ever with United it will depend as much on the stability and running of the club as to whether they’re able to take the next step, if they aren’t it will likely go to shit again as things rarely stay the same in football at the top level; you’re usually either going forward or backward as we have discovered ourselves recently. Hopefully in their case they continue as they have been and throw hundreds of millions at galactic style signings on mega money.
