Manchester United future also at stake as Ten Hag faces endgame

It is worth just drinking this in, the full implications of a scaled-up triple-decade Boehly supremacy. It has so far taken two years to gouge out any pretence of being a serious sporting and commercial concern. Just think what he could achieve in 30. Crash the global exchanges. Hollow out the Earth’s core. Give a dead leg to every koala bear on the planet. Most obviously Boehly will be nearly 80 by the time his project reaches fruition, up there in his virtual hover-box, unveiling the latest crop of bespoke disaffected 20-year-olds grown in jars from insect protein.

It is of course all too easy to laugh at Chelsea’s frat-bro-with-a-polo-mallet version of football finance. For Manchester United supporters, in particular, there is surely something comforting in seeing a version of speculative co-ownership that makes United’s own hopeful muddle look relatively sane and benevolent.

But while Chelsea continue to make headlines for sheer zaniness, there is something salutary too here, not least in the idea of future planning and things that actually matter, as United enter their own familiar autumn cycle before Saturday’s trip to Southampton.

The dogs have been barking around Old Trafford this week, the past is rattling away at the windows again. We know this stuff by now. Recent former players with podcasts to sell are keen to restate the vital importance of the experiences of recent former players. Cristiano Ronaldo – whose re-signing represents as much as any other single event in United’s descent into a sickly and dysfunctional entity – thinks United have become a sickly and dysfunctional entity.

And this is now something of a kill zone for Erik ten Hag. Welcome to autumn in Manchester, season of scythes and deadheading, of burning the stubble. The past two permanent managers got the bullet in November and December, which at least provided a narrative to the season.

It is a familiar process, one that seems to be playing out again. The team – somehow always still the same eternally contracted first XI – are in a state of congealment. Gary Neville says he’s embarrassed. Marcus Rashford has released a video of himself doing pull-ups in a deserted Siberian barn.

Look down United’s fixtures and it isn’t hard to see how Erik’s last stand may play out from here. There are plenty of games coming up United can win. They haven’t lost to Southampton in 15 games, Barnsley once in the last hundred years. FC Twente are 11th in the Eredivisie. Leicester, Ipswich, Everton. There is an opportunity here still for a galvanising uptick in form.

But these are also games that can get you sacked. From 29 September the run reads: Spurs, Porto, Aston Villa, Brentford, Fenerbahçe, West Ham, Chelsea; then Arsenal in early December; then Manchester City, Newcastle, Liverpool in the space of a month to 4 January. Is Ten Hag going to make it to FA Cup third round week? Is he going to make it to the Europa League if they lose on Saturday?

There are two points worth making at this stage. First, Ten Hag probably has run his course. United have won six of their past 16 matches, one of those on penalties against Coventry and another the excellent, but ultimately confusing, FA Cup final victory over Manchester City.

Otherwise there is still no real idea what a Ten Hag team are supposed to look like despite, or perhaps because of, that £600m expenditure on discontented parts. This season £320m of talent signed on his watch has played a combined total of one minute, Antony, the human shotgun above the fireplace, coming on in the 89th minute against Brighton. Still putting Casemiro out there every week feels like marching into battle in a gleaming Napoleonic uniform, proudly wielding your one-shot musket. This feels like a manager who had his shot, who is a part of the previous confusion not a victim of it.

Welcome to the death spiral then, probably. But the second point here is far more important. Ten Hag or not Ten Hag may be the immediate story arc. But it is also a detail, a distraction from the fact, even on the evidence of this week, that United and Ineos are facing some far more profound challenges.

The club have played down the potentially alarming £113m losses announced this week. The word is this can be successfully offset to escape a PSR charge. United generate so much income still that straying outside the boundaries a little is hardly cause for panic.

But nothing exists in perpetuity, and the other really damning, unarguably negative note for English football’s great sickly mega-club is the start of the new Champions League format this coming week. To be absent from what is effectively the world’s new club football super league, to be playing – no offence to PAOK Salonika and Bodø/Glimt – PAOK Salonika and Bodø/Glimt is a genuinely stark reality check. This thing is the future. And the bottom line is Manchester United, who undoubtedly have a freehold interest on the past, are not in it.

The fact remains for all the talk of super-competent billionaires and marginal gains merchants, Ineos has yet to achieve anything tangible beyond some executive appointments. Technically United are a little worse off. This time last year they were in the Champions League. They still have the same manager. The scale of the losses is partly down to £47.8m of costs associated with the Ineos buy-in.

This is to be expected. A tanker turns slowly. But Ineos does need to show its workings at some point, above all to dispel the suspicion that these are not simply people who were cutting edge two decades ago, that their experiences and practices are fit for purpose. Cutting back the overheads, firing staff, talking confidently about optics, putting the feelers out for public money. This is all very much from the 1990s management consultant model.

There is also a central flaw in the idea that expertise from other areas – chemical industry corporate know-how, cycling smarts – can be imported into football at every level from performance to management. Football is itself the cutting edge now. This is not an under-geared, under-optimised industry. It is brutally successful and cutting edge. Football is ahead of other sports. Football is successful commercially. You may know cycling, the French league and how to close down a refinery. But do you know the biggest game in town? Maybe rather than a rainmaker, new ideas, adjacent experience, you actually need a specialist here.

Ineos Sport needs to demonstrate, perhaps even to the organisation itself, that it has this ability to create a step change in United’s fortunes, to renovate the most resistant, sclerotic institution in sport. Above all to provide the major, cycle-busting change that can actually make a difference.

What actually matters here? What is the most important United-related news event even of this week? As ever, it comes down to investment in an actual, realisable version the future. Which is, in this case, the stadium.

This week Ineos announced its own slightly more urgent project, not the full triple-decade Boehly, but a plan to renovate Old Trafford and its surrounds that it hopes to complete by 2030. Should this highly ambitious time frame come to pass Sir Jim Ratcliffe would be 78, a paltry kind of age for super-driven marathon-running billionaire. But it is also a key reminder of the bigger picture.

Sacking managers, chasing after saviours, new players, the past. This has been a kind of vice. The reality is the only version of Manchester United’s past that has any currency now is to remember that the Ferguson era of the 1990s was also built on bricks and mortar, on the infrastructure investment that allowed United to expand and outspend the rest of the field.

Managers will come and go, perhaps even quite imminently. The day-to-day will continue to dominate. Ten Hag is arguably two defeats from a point where his presence becomes unsustainable. Content must be created and that content must feel vital. But with another season already starting to narrow, the stadium is the real test; for this ownership and for the prospect of ever breaking the current cycle.