Alex Keble looks at the numbers to answer this week's big question: What style is Erik ten Hag trying to play with his Manchester United players?
Man Utd tactical analysis
Man Utd are a team without a discernible tactical identity, say most pundits.
It has been the line for quite some time and was again the conclusion drawn by many after Tottenham Hotspur dominated possession in a hurried, stringy, and contorted 90 minutes in Sunday's 2-2 draw at Old Trafford.
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“We need to see a style of play develop in the next few months or else I think the coach will be vulnerable,” Gary Neville said after the match.
“They really struggle to be able to know where each other are and put combinations and patterns together. Where is the default style of play in this team? I don't see it and that is a real concern.”
However, that analysis doesn’t reflect the whole picture anymore. Neville’s take on United’s ambling and unstructured passing is correct, but United’s style of play is no mystery.
In fact, Ten Hag has been very open about what he is trying to do - and Man Utd are doing it.
They have a strategy, it’s just that Ten Hag’s tactical intentions are either ill-suited to the club’s stature, poorly executed, or both, which translates to baggy performances that appear less thought out than they really are.
Man Utd's tactics are in their DNA
Ten Hag told us the whole story after the 3-0 home defeat to Manchester City in November.
“I can't play like Ajax because I have different players,” he said. “I came here with my philosophy, based on possession, but I wanted to combine it with the DNA of Manchester United, the players and their characters.
“Last year, we saw what that was. We played very good football. This season, the philosophy is not different, only I want to emphasise more on going direct.
“We want to press from different blocks and then go direct.”
That, in a nutshell, is the entire philosophy laid bare.
United have a long history of fast, wing-focused, direct attacking football that stretches back beyond Sir Alex Ferguson to Sir Matt Busby, and this is the “DNA” to which Ten Hag refers.
Once you know this, it becomes easier to spot United’s game plan. You can notice the low possession share, the hunched formation, the number of speedy forwards packed into the front line, and the explosive bursts of pressing designed to take advantage of attacking transitions.
Direct attacking
Thirteen points off the top of the Premier League table and with one win in their last six matches, Ten Hag’s tactics self-evidently aren’t working. But there is an identifiable style in development.
Man Utd have had 50 direct attacks this season, the third most in the Premier League, while their direct speed of 1.89 metres per second is the fifth highest. That’s the same as Luton Town and significantly higher than their 1.35 in 2022/23, which was the 13th-highest.
United have also been caught offside 57 times this season, which is more than anyone else, again indicating a wish to attack directly.
Defensively, they are joint-second in the Premier League for high turnovers, with 208, and fourth for possessions won in the final third, with 134. And they they are only ninth overall for Passes Per Defensive Action (PPDA), with 12.5.
This gap reflects Ten Hag’s instructions to press in sudden gear-changing moments, with a conservative midblock commonly deployed so that United, spring loaded, can launch a counter-attack behind an advancing opposition.
The 2-2 draw with Spurs exemplified all of these traits. Spurs held 63 per cent possession and, encouraged forward, left huge open spaces in the full-back positions for Marcus Rashford and Alejandro Garnacho to counter-attack into.
Both Man Utd goals were fast attacks, one scored on the counter and the other resulting from possession being snatched on the halfway line. From here, United poured into the final third before Spurs had a chance to get back into their defensive positions.
As the above image shows, everything at Man Utd comes through Bruno Fernandes, who is tasked with setting away the three rapid United forwards.
It’s a simple tactic, a surprising one given Ten Hag’s history at Ajax, and a relatively unsuccessful one.
Why there IS a strategy
But we cannot reasonably claim there isn’t a strategy at play.
United’s “collection of single passes” is a symptom of the tactics. The strategy, however, comes with problems.
Playing counter-attacking and direct football inherently disorganises central midfield and makes controlled, rhythmic pre-planned passing structures – sometimes known as “automatisms” – difficult.
To put it bluntly, the flaws are woven into the fabric of the system, which is precisely why there isn’t a single elite team in Europe who play in this way.
“The last time that I saw combinations of play and a series of passes that looked like they belonged to one another was under Louis van Gaal,” Neville said.
“What I see here is a collection of single passes, where a player receives it and seems to have to work out where the next player is, rather than knowing where the next player is.”
Neville is right, and what is worrying for Man Utd fans is that this shapeless, improvisational feel is a necessary side effect of the tactical identity Ten Hag is deploying.
In theory, United could develop some automatisms from back to front via Fernandes, with American Football-style set-plays enacted to launch a counter-attack. But fast and direct football is loose by nature, requiring ingenuity and quick thinking at every turn because it is reactive, not proactive.
In other words, when a system depends upon the opposition’s flaws, or moments of weakness in their transition, it cannot be practised to an elite level on the training pitch. You are countering the other, not proactively defining the narrative.
The bigger problem: Ten Hag’s tactics elongate the pitch
We can explain United’s defensive problems by comparing them to Man City.
Pep Guardiola’s ideas have an unprecedented hold on European football and, with their roots in Johan Cruyff’s revolutionary tactics at Ajax and Barcelona, there is an obvious connection between Guardiola and the high-pressing, positional-based, possession-hogging football Ten Hag delivered at Ajax.
One of the core principles of Guardiola’s football is his slow and measured build-up play, designed to ensure every player remains in a compressed block together. They move up and down as one, gradually building attacks but also ensuring they are perfectly positioned to defend when the ball is turned over.
Fast and direct football like Ten Hag’s at Man Utd is the polar opposite: by instructing the front three to stay high and make constant hard runs on the shoulder of the last defender, and by telling Fernandes to play longer passes towards them, the team’s shape becomes stretched.
The distance between United’s defensive and attacking line is often enormous, and, when opponents reach the final third, United’s wingers are regularly caught well behind the play, exposing the full-backs.
Equally problematic is the sheer amount of space the United central midfielders must cover between those defensive and attacking lines, again because of that stretched shape.
Both of these issues were on display in the 2-2 draw with Spurs, including in the build-up to Spurs' second goal. Note how much room the United midfielders have around them, and note that neither Garnacho nor Rashford are in the picture.
This elongation of the pitch explains why it is so easy to play through Man Utd this season.
They have faced the fourth-most take-ons in the Premier League, with 442, have been dribbled past on 199 occasions, which is more than all but three other teams, and have faced the third most progressive carries, with 446, behind only West Ham United and Sheffield United.
That final stat is damning. It should not be so easy to carry the ball through the thirds.
We’ve all seen United cut open this season as a result of that stretched and disconnected shape, hence why they’ve conceded the fourth-most shots, 315, and the fifth most shot-creating actions, 556, behind West Ham, Sheff Utd, Luton Town, and Burnley.
Returning to the Spurs match, a look at the passing networks of the two teams, reveals the problem.
One team, controlling possession, have compressed the space and enacted clear automated passes. The other, playing a direct and improvisational game, is full of holes.
Passing networks from Man Utd 2-2 Spurs
Source: @markstatsbot
Can Ten Hag’s system ever work?
“They run in the wrong moment, too late,” Ten Hag said after the 2-0 defeat to Spurs back in August. “Especially the front didn’t recover. It is not about the midfield, it is about the back and the front. That is why we were open.”
After the Arsenal defeat a few weeks later, Ten Hag said something similar. “We got stretched, and we have to improve that. We have to be more compact, otherwise you can never counter-press. I had a problem with how the defence moved and I had a problem with the responding in the defence transition of our offensive players.”
He’s right, as we have covered, and yet when the return Spurs fixture came along five months later, the exact same problems persisted.
🗣️ "The problems are deeper at Man United"
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) January 14, 2024
🗣️ "This United team, you haven't got a clue what you're gonna get"
The Super Sunday panel discuss Manchester United's style of play and whether they should be doing better by now under Erik ten Hag ⚽ pic.twitter.com/M8fKmFspsR
Surely at a certain point it is time to question whether the methodology itself is flawed – and whether Ten Hag ought to be attempting to reproduce his Ajax football, no matter the club’s DNA or its squad profile.
“We expected that high pressing, front foot, high tempo possession-play,” Neville said.
“[Ten Hag] said something a few weeks ago that he can't deliver that at Manchester United which I thought was a really interesting thing for him to say because other managers have proven at Brighton and at Tottenham that you can deliver with players that maybe aren't even as valuable in the transfer market as the ones that United have.”
That is a viewpoint many United fans will share.
Perhaps a squad bloated with fast forwards but lacking ball-playing defenders won’t be able to replicate Ajax patterns of play. But a progressive and proactive mentality, coupled with passing-triangle automatisms that players can fall back on in tough moments, might at least puff out chests.
It would certainly make it easier for people to spot Ten Hag’s plan. At the moment, few have noticed what he’s trying to do, even after he has directly told us.
Maybe that’s because a super-club playing fast and direct football is so rare in the modern game that nobody expects it – and therefore nobody is looking for it.
Ten Hag might reflect on that and question why no other manager expecting to challenge for titles is trying the same thing as he is.
A summary of Ten Hag's tactics
In short, Ten Hag's tactical strategy is all about directness and speed.
He sits his team in a midblock, rather than pressing high, and instead of looking to dominate possession and build carefully with short passing into the final third, he wants to release his attackers into space with longer or more direct forward passes.
Unlike Man City, for example, who want possession and camp in opposition territory, United start from a deeper position, happily drawing the opponent forward before breaking in behind with straight balls through the lines.
That, at least, is the ideal, but all too often they look wayward and without a clear strategy, only showing this template in glimpses. The big question is whether Ten Hag’s plan can ever really work at a club of Man Utd’s size.