Five reasons for Manchester United fans to be cheerful features the Ten Hag sack

Things are looking pretty bleak again for Manchester United fans, who would presumably rather not wait for the last game of the season to experience joy as they did last term.

But there are always reasons to be cheerful and we’ve come up with five of them.

The transfer window
We’ve not seen enough of the new arrivals – if we’ve seen them at all – to make a reasoned judgement on whether they will be good additions or not, so we made unreasonable ones instead. But the transfer policy makes sense.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his INEOS team were adamant that the days of signing big-name players on mammoth salaries were over and they’ve been true to their word. Leny Yoro was their most expensive signing, but also their youngest at 18, so he could be starring at Old Trafford for over a decade, if he doesn’t up sticks to Real Madrid the first chance he gets.

There’s a sense with all of the arrivals that there is untapped potential. There’s room to improve and while they might not work out, at least there’s a chance that they could be brilliant for years to come and either play a part in getting United back to the top or earn them significant transfer fees when sold. It’s a sustainable model.

They also managed to sell some players for the first time in forever. Bar the summer of 2009, when almost all of the money made was through the sale of Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid, it was the most fruitful transfer window in the club’s history, with Scott McTominay, Mason Greenwood and others bringing in close to £100m.

We have ranked all the summer moves here.

Ten Hag’s kids
Say what you want about Ten Hag (plenty coming up) but he does give opportunities to young players. Easy to say that any manager would have thrown Kobbie Mainoo and Alejandro Garnacho into the team, such is their talent, but we really don’t buy that. And woeful though Casemiro was on Sunday, it takes some bottle to take him off for a Premier League debutant and his “big great legs” when 2-0 down to their bitter rivals.

After a decent performance in which he certainly didn’t look out of place, Toby Collyer will be full of confidence at the start of a season which he’s now thinking could be his breakthrough campaign. And for him, Amad Diallo and other young players in the squad, there’s a very real possibility that it could be under Ten Hag.

Unlike at Chelsea, where academy graduates stroll around the training pitch with pure profit dollar signs above their heads, the United youth team players must be buzzing with the prospect of first-team opportunities in the near future.

And the ‘if you’re good enough, you’re old enough’ mantra will always go down well with the fans, who like nothing more than seeing a young player come through the ranks and make an impact at Old Trafford.

Expected goals
Ten Hag could probably see the eye rolls from the gathered media as he cited the statistic as one of his excuses for his side’s 3-0 defeat. “I saw the xG [against], it wasn’t that high,” he said. Most of the various different xG models had both United and Liverpool somewhere between 1.3 and 1.8. It was a pretty even game in terms of the quality of chances.

Certainly more even than the 2-2 at the end of last season, in which Liverpool had an xG of 3.9 to United’s 0.9. And there’s an improvement in general from United, who are still very much mid-table with an xG against of 1.40 per 90 minutes, but they’ve been significantly better than last season, when they were the fifth-worst in the division on 1.81 per 90.

Combine that with the 17.4 shots per 90 against last term compared to 11.7 this season and there are quantifiable reasons to be positive to add to the clear observable evidence that they’re nowhere near as open as they were.

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Absentees
The defence should improve further when Ten Hag has all of his players to call upon. Manuel Ugarte was bought with a view to win possession and shield the back four and Liverpool illustrated the need for his speedy introduction into the first team. Whether Yoro is a nailed-on starter isn’t clear, but with him, Matthijs de Ligt, Harry Maguire and Lisandro Martinez, Ten Hag has strength in depth at centre-back and all-important competition for places.

Diogo Dalot impressed in the first two games of the season but the return of Luke Shaw is crucial for the Red Devils to provide balance on the left of the defence, and the Portugal international can then challenge Mazraoui for a spot on the right, which again should increase their levels.

The United attack is more a cause for concern given their limited impact as a whole in the opening three games, but Joshua Zirkzee’s off the mark, Marcus Rashford surely can’t continue to be quite so pants and Garnacho will presumably hit his stride at some point. There’s also the return of Rasmus Hojlund to look forward to, of whom big things are expected after a first season of fits and starts.

Ten Hag sack
They had a good look around and in the end, on the back of FA Cup success, Sir Jim and his team chose the path of least resistance and cost ahead of a summer in which they knew they would need to be spending whatever money they had available on new players.

The good news is that having not sacked Ten Hag in the summer, that option is still very much available to them with not a great deal of added expense given the insulting one-year extension they tacked on the end of his contract.

This would be a far more depressing situation if a new manager had lost two of their opening three games. The fact is the vast majority of us expected United to lose to Brighton and Liverpool because United are still managed by Ten Hag, and any improvements (which there have been) were unlikely to be significant enough against two Premier League teams they’ve made a habit of losing against.

And nothing we’ve seen so far this season, including those defensive improvements, the new arrivals and the continued reliance on the academy products, has convinced us that Ten Hag is the man to take United forward, as everyone knew right up until the very last game of last season, when the wool was firmly pulled over the eyes of a significant portion of United fans, only to be all but removed less than a month into the new season.

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