'He will blow your mind!' - How 'awkward' Manchester United boss Erik ten Hag transformed Ajax

Let me start by telling you a little story about Erik ten Hag’s first day at Ajax. Normally not so much of big deal but… he walked in with a suitcase from his former club FC Utrecht.

The equivalent would be Bielsa walking into Carrington in his Leeds United tracksuit after being appointed Manchester United manager. You can imagine what kind of first impression Ten Hag made at the Ajax supporters. Not so good...

Ajax fans hated him, even before his first day. Ten Hag is a so-called ‘farmer’, from the countryside and this is everything the arrogant Ajax fans detest in the big city of Amsterdam. He also has a strange voice, all reasons to make a lot of fun of him. The bald, talking Easter egg meme was born…

Also his media appearances are quite s***! His first press conference was a couple of days before ‘De Klassieker’ against Feyenoord and Ten Hag only gave answers consisting of one sentence. One of the worst we’ve seen from a new Ajax manager. It was like Ajax was playing against a small team, not the biggest match of the season against their biggest rival. All the journalists were laughing, “what was this?!”

Ten Hag was literally the opposite of Louis van Gaal. With Van Gaal you can laugh. A press conference is a game and he plays with you and your questions. He speaks a lot, about himself and his philosophy and all things around a match. But Ten Hag won’t. He is very reserved.

Ten Hag won his first match, 2-0 against Feyenoord. But Ajax were in ruins when he took over. PSV won the championship after beating Ajax 3-0 in Eindhoven. This really was a new low for Ajax.

Also, Ajax experienced the drama with Abdelhak Nouri’s on-pitch collapse and missed out on European football for the first time in a long, long while. They were a shambles, one big disaster. So Ten Hag had the chance to build things up again and couldn’t have started at a better moment. Especially when you look back with hindsight.

So how did he do it? Ten Hag inherited quite a good squad, but additions were needed. Hakim Ziyech, Donny van de Beek, Andre Onana, Nicolas Tagliafico, Noussair Mazraoui and David Neres were there. Marc Overmars brought in Dusan Tadic and Daley Blind as Ajax finally decided to pay some decent transfer money for good players and to not fight an unfair fight by relying on youth only.

And Ten Hag is a tactical mastermind. He quickly built a good team and took Ajax back to the Champions League. He was the first coach in a long, long time to get Ajax through the Champions League qualifying rounds, giving him a little breather to build an even better team.

Ajax always play 4-3-3 because Johan Cruyff said so. But for ages the club thought way to simply about this. The 4-3-3 is great, but also a little outdated. Ten Hag understood this and under his guidance, Ajax started to play a kind of 2.0 version of 4-3-3. Ten Hag really pimped the tactical skills of the players and brought in an attitude of being switched on 24/7/365. When he came in, some players weren’t able to really play two or three matches a week for 90 minutes at 100%. They just couldn’t keep up. Now they can. They’re very, very fit.

Slowly but surely fans recognized what Ten Hag was doing. After a Champions League group match at Benfica, Ajax fans sang his name for the first time and almost reluctantly, he was pushed over to thank them. The start of a love story, so to speak.

Since then, Ten Hag is the boss. He still isn’t media savvy. Press conferences are a disaster, as are the interviews. But Ten Hag is very focused on his job. He also had to fight a media war during the 18/19 season. You can compare this with the tabloids in the UK. Ten Hag was hammered time and time again, also because he wouldn’t give the biggest newspaper, De Telegraaf, any exclusives. He just wouldn’t pick up his phone. Frank de Boer did in the past and was protected by this newspaper, but for Ten Hag it was the other way around.

But almost stubbornly, he focused on the football side of things and eventually even De Telegraaf had to admit he was doing a good job. They simply couldn’t deny it anymore.

Ten Hag likes his team to play versatile systems. He wants players to be able to adapt and for sure he is a tactical genius, much more than Ole Gunnar Solskjaer or Frank Lampard for instance who faced a bit of the same problem. And Ten Hag knows how to extract the best of Donny van de Beek!

I don’t think Ten Hag needs a lot of money or players to make United successful again, but he needs the club to do to some smart things. Not paying 60/70/80 million for Harry Maguire, but more the Leicester approach. He can develop young players. Even though Ajax started spending more, there’s always room for new talents like Ryan Gravenberch or Jurrien Timber. If they’re good enough, Ten Hag plays them. United must be able to deliver him a good squad. United currently plays more of a 4-4-2 in comparison with the 4-3-3 of Ajax, but Ten Hag knows how to play 4-4-2 as he did at FC Utrecht.

When you see interviews of Ten Hag you can’t imagine how he is able to motivate his players. When you hear him speak you really think: ‘is this the manager of my club? isn’t everybody laughing at him?’ But almost every player who served under Ten Hag speaks highly of his skills, even those not in the starting eleven.

Ten Hag is really awkward with the media but internally, when he feels in a safe environment and can talk about football and tactics, he will blow your mind! I’ve heard this from people who have witnessed it with their own eyes.

It’s like a complete transformation, like two different people. He is a great orator, but put a camera in his face and he is like a deer in the headlights. It’s really black and white, almost unbelievable.

It could be, but don’t forget that Ten Hag managed the second team of Bayern Munich when Pep Guardiola was there. He has some foreign experience and even if this could be a concern, Ten Hag showed in the Champions League that he is good and smart enough on the tactical side of football to set up his team, even as the underdog, against some of the biggest clubs in the world and beat them, such as Real Madrid and Juventus during the 18/19 season, or with the famous 4-4 against Chelsea.

Ten Hag chose the smart route: he was an assistant, took charge of FC Utrecht, had has stint at Bayern and now served almost four years with Ajax. He has way more experience than Solskjaer to make a comparison.

Ten Hag was purely a coach, Marc Overmars was the football director and Edwin van der Sar is the general manager. United can’t hope for Van der Sar to come in as a technical director because that’s simply not what he is. Van der Sar is more of a Woodward, who wanted to appoint a director of football.

After a difficult start in that role, Overmars did a really, really good job before his sudden departure. Overmars was in charge of transfer business, Ten Hag wasn’t. Ten Hag of course has to agree which players come in but we can’t avoid the fact that Ten Hag has picked some players he worked with in the past.

This wasn’t a big success. Zakaria Labyad followed him from FC Utrecht to Ajax but is considered a big failure. Sean Klaiber also came over from Utrecht and didn’t do too badly, but he is nowhere near good enough to play for Ajax and Ten Hag should have known.

Ajax really stepped up their scouting department and I would strongly advise United to do the same. Ten Hag really should focus on the football side and of course there should be meetings about identifying targets, but don’t let him dictate transfer business.

I think the Mikel Arteta situation at Arsenal is a good one to compare this with. It won’t be easy, but United has drifted so far away from the big club they were and this cannot be repaired in only one summer with a new manager and some new players. Ten Hag needs a little time and maybe the start will be difficult, but as long as he gets some time and a new player here and there, just like Ajax did, I think he can make United a club to reckon with again.

He did it at Ajax in only a short space of time, but in the Netherlands it’s easier. I think it could take a little longer at United, but when you look at Arteta once again, a year and a half can make a big difference, and as soon as players start to feel what Ten Hag wants and expects, things will kick in and become better and better.