If Erik ten Hag fails, we will have a good idea of ​​who is to blame.

The 52-year-old Dutch coach will become Manchester United coach next season. He and the club have had different results over the last nine years.

At every club, the Ten Hag has succeeded. With every coach United have failed.

Why should it be any different for United now? The four people who have held the job permanently since Sir Alex Ferguson stepped down in 2013, have failed.

But the Ten Hag had one strength that set it apart from its predecessors.

Swiss Movement

And that’s the ability to deliver the kind of football United fans dream of.

Ferguson’s four successors have been accused of playing the wrong way. David Moyes made United act like Everton. Louis van Gaal had an attacking plan that was so slow that even the players got bored.

Jose Mourinho so he attacks but plays defense. Ole Gunnar Solskjær gave too much creative responsibility to the players.

None of the four managed to tease the pattern of offensive movement seen in Liverpool and Manchester City.

This is the specialty of Ten Hag who is now coaching Ajax. One can count on one hand how many teams in Europe have played better football than Ajax in the last four years.

They have made the match look like a video game, where the ball flies between the players without hesitation or error. For each track there is a new race that creates space. The balance is ideal, the distances are carefully trained.

The system ticks like a Swiss movement.

Everything is so well organized and arranged that even Egon will be impressed.

Ajax played according to the Dutch idea, with wide wings and the ball along the grass. But Ten Hag, who hails from Haaksbergen near the German border, has added good structure and discipline.

His style is similar to that of Pep Guardiola, who coached Bayern Munich’s A team while Ten Hag worked with the second team there from 2013 to 2015.

So Ten Hag came to United with a clear plan. This tends to work.

Two big layers

In 2013, in his first season as coach, he led the Go Ahead Eagles to the Dutch top league for the first time in 17 years. Four years later, he led Utrecht to the Europa League.

Now Ajax are marching towards a third league title in four full seasons under him. The year they didn’t win, they barely took the lead when the league was canceled due to the pandemic.

Ten Hag didn’t just build a good team at Ajax. He has built two.

People remember the best of the 2018/19 season, when they beat Juventus and Real Madrid from the Champions League, and were only seconds away from reaching the final. In the league, they scored 119 goals, an average of 3.5 per game.

Like all good teams on a small budget, they disbanded. Big clubs bought stars like Matthijs de Ligt, Frenkie de Jong, Hakim Ziyech and Donny van de Beek.

But Ten Hag have built a new team with those remaining, like Daley Blind and Dušan Tadić, as well as new talent like Antony and Ryan Gravenberch. Ajax lead the league as usual.

In the Champions League, they won all six of their matches in the group, with 5-1 against Sporting and 4-0 against Dortmund, before losing to Benfica.

Meanwhile, Ajax played the kind of football United had dreamed of for nine years.

So we’ll see him at Old Trafford?

Three leaf clover

It depends on who Ten Hag works with.

Especially the midfield needs to change. Middle was Fred and Scott McTominay too slow and clumsy to pull the lever on the Ten Hag engine. Nemanja Matić left this summer; Paul Pogba might do the same.

Above are the picks of the frail Cristiano Ronaldo (37 years old) and Anthony Martial (on loan to Sevilla). Edinson Cavani’s contract expires in June.

It’s not strange to see Athletics reports that United are chasing a striker, a right winger and two central midfielders.

Will the Ten Hag get this? He is not a “manager” who trades players and finds talent. He only takes care of the team himself. He needs help.

At Ajax, he worked with a general manager, Edwin van der Sar, and a director, Marc Overmars. The success of the team belongs to all three, as well as the academy that has sent so much talent to the A-team.

United now receive only a third of this partnership. Overmars resigned in February after sending inappropriate messages to female colleagues. Van der Sar stays at Ajax.

This is what creates the most uncertainty about Ten Hag’s chances of success, because even though United is a bigger club than Ajax, it is far from having the same sporting competence.

Commercial club

Just look at CV profiles around Ten Hag. Van der Sar has managed Ajax since 2016. At United, the boss is Richard Arnold, a commercial guru who got the job in January.

Overmars became director of Ajax in 2012. United have two directors, John Murtough and Darren Fletcher, who were promoted last year.

Ajax is one of the smartest clubs on the continent. United has become a big club in Europe that has had the worst form in the last decade.

Van Gaal called United a “commercial club” where they know more about making money than winning trophies. He’s right.

But the Ten Hag probably knew this. British tabloid newspaper Sun. has written that he butchered United’s sporting structure during two interviews. Murtough and Fletcher came home shocked at what they heard.

The Sun has made mistakes before, but this sounds like a Ten Hag: Straightforward, honest, and concerned that everything has to be where it belongs.

Miles behind

And he has to, because if he wants to bring United back to the top, he has to have talented people around him, especially in terms of signings.

Even so, it will still be a few years before United fight for the title, as City and Liverpool are way ahead.

So it’s going to be a long-term project where the club itself has the most to prove. Ten Hag has shown that he can build a brilliant and successful football team.

Now the board must show that it is actually possible for a coach at United to succeed.