Tuchel, Conte or Poch can't save Man Utd alone

FT Desk

• 16 Mar 2022 08:12 CDT
• 4 min read

Paul Scholes claimed Man Utd needed a "proper coach" after their Champions League exit at Atletico Madrid's hands on Tuesday, but is Ralf Rangnick really the problem?

Scholes made the claim on watching the match for BT Sport alongside Rio Ferdinand and Owen Hargreaves. United lost 1-0 on the night and 2-1 on aggregate, with the wait for a first piece of silverware since 2017 rumbling on.

Scholes, who won 25 major honours as a Man Utd midfielder between 1993 and 2013, singled Rangnick out for criticism after Renan Lodi's first-half header had proved to be the difference on the night.

Scholes: 'how was he chosen?'

"How he was chosen to be manager of this club for six months until the end of the season, I'll never know," he said. "The coach is a massive part of it. This isn't a terrible group of players. I think if you give this group of players a structure and way of playing, there's some real talent in the squad.

"They're not as talented as the teams above them, we know that. But, the very first thing this club needs to do, to get anywhere near winning the league again, is get a proper coach."

Scholes certainly had a "proper coach" in Sir Alex Ferguson, the record-breaking Scot who steered United to two Champions Leagues and their 20th English league triumph before calling it a day in 2013, the same summer as Scholes.

Since those halcyon days, Man Utd have run through five managers - David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and now Rangnick; with Ryan Giggs and Michael Carrick each having acted as interims. Their trophy count since? Four: one FA Cup, one EFL Cup, one FA Community Shield and one UEFA Europa League.

Three of those trophies were won by Mourinho, who was relieved of his duties in 2018. The Portuguese famously held up three fingers when comparing his title wins to the other coaches in the league, and he was perhaps right to point out how successful he had been elsewhere: league wins with Porto, Chelsea, Inter Milan and Real Madrid; Champions League triumphs with Porto and Inter.

A familiar pattern at Old Trafford

The others can tell a similar story. Moyes led Everton to their highest finish of the Premier League era before his ill-fated spell at the club. Van Gaal was a serial champion, winning honours with Ajax, Barcelona and Bayern Munich before his two-season stay. Rangnick may not have done enough to catch Scholes' attention previously, but he was the brains behind the rises of Hoffenheim and RB Leipzig from lower league obscurity to Bundesliga prominence in Germany.

"It comes from leadership," Scholes also said. "It comes from a coach demanding that from his players and gets that from his players. I don't want to keep having a go at Ralf Rangnick, he seems really nice and comes across well in interviews, he's very honest."

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Perhaps Scholes should train his lens on the leadership above the head coach, though. United spend big in the transfer market, but that doesn't necessarily translate into top performances on the pitch. His colleague Ferdinand (£40m/€48m from Leeds in 2002) is the only arrival from the Ferguson era to break into United's top 10 most expensive transfer arrivals. The other nine - all more expensive - have joined since 2013.

Ferguson was also given the luxury of time, allowed six years at the helm before the trophy cabinet began to fill up in the 1990s. Some of the best managers in the world have tried to succeed him, but none have been shown the same patience.

Thomas Tuchel, Antonio Conte and Mauricio Pochettino have all been linked in recent weeks, but until United sort things out behind the scenes, there is no reason to expect they wouldn't simply go the way of Mourinho and Van Gaal, and not Ferguson.