Erik ten Hag has admitted former Man United boss Ralf Rangnick was right in saying the club needed ‘open heart surgery’ and claims they are still ‘really far from winning titles’.
Rangnick took over from Ole Gunnar Solskjaer on an interim basis and led United to a sixth-place finish and 58 points back in the 2021-22 season, often outlining the club’s shortcomings in a brutal fashion, even claiming they were six years behind Liverpool.
He said the issues ran so deep at Old Trafford that major structural changes were needed from top to bottom: ‘You don’t even need glasses to see and analyse where the problems are.
‘Now it’s about how do we solve them? It’s not enough to do some minor amendments – cosmetic things. In medicine you would say that this is an operation of the open heart.’
And in an interview with AS in the Netherlands, Ten Hag confessed that Rangnick, who led Austria at Euro 2024, was right, and that United’s standards are still not high enough.’
Erik ten Hag has warned that Manchester United are still far from winning the Premier League
Rangnick (left) said ‘open heart surgery’ was required at Man United and Sir Jim Ratcliffe (right) has been the one to come in and execute the operation
Ten Hag said: ‘Rangnick was absolutely right. We’ve been working very hard on that for two years, but he said it just right: it’s a thorough, very complex operation.
”And I knew when I started that it was going to be a tough job. There are a lot of people who have advised me. Louis van Gaal too.
‘We want this club back to where it was more than a decade ago, to a club that wins the Premier League, which can win Champions Leagues. We are really a long way away from that, I think.
‘I think we’ve taken steps since then, otherwise we wouldn’t have won two prizes either. But we are not yet so far that a ‘winning culture’ already prevails here in all respects. Our standards, our norms and values, still need to go up.’
He also hit out at the mentality of the group he inherited, adding: ‘I was not shocked. But the culture, the mentality was really not good. To win, to really achieve top performance every week, we had to change a lot.’
Rangnick’s complaints had been echoed through former Leeds boss Jesse Marsch on Simon Jordan’s podcast.
The American revealed: ‘I think he knew he was going into the lion’s den but he couldn’t turn down the opportunity to coach Manchester United. This is a massive opportunity for anyone.
‘What I heard from Ralf and others that were there at the time is that the cohesion in the club was next to zero.
‘That their communication with the scouting departments and the sporting departments and the directors and that made them feel there probably wasn’t much of a future for them there, which maybe that was the case.’
United have since undergone that open heart surgery that Rangnick said was required, restructuring their football operation since INEOS under Sir Jim Ratcliffe took charge of the football operation.
