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Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe has candidly admitted that keeping Erik ten Hag and appointing Dan Ashworth were both mistakes.
After an extremely difficult 2023/24 season in which United finished a lowly eighth in the Premier League, the expectation was that Ten Hag would be sacked at the end of the campaign.
However, the hierarchy decided to hand him an extended contract after he led United to an FA Cup final win over Manchester City.
The decision turned out to be the wrong one, as the Red Devils started the current campaign poorly, leading to Ten Hag’s sacking just nine games in.
Meanwhile, Ashworth was also dismissed from his role as sporting director just five months into the job. United spent several weeks trying to pry him from Newcastle’s hands but his transition to Old Trafford was not smooth.
It later emerged that Ashworth did not see eye to eye with a number of United’s executives including Ratcliffe himself.
Parting ways with Ten Hag and Ashworth cost United around £15m.
Ratcliffe spoke to The Times and reflected on this. The British businessman told the newspaper, “Yeah, they were just mistakes. I mean, the Erik thing is slightly mitigating. There was quite a lot of debate about that at time. It wasn’t just the FA Cup final. The fans were clearly of the view that we’d like to stick with him and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, they were both mistakes. I don’t think we can say much more than that.”
“It’s a journey and there’s a lot of decisions that we have to make over the course of that and we’re not going to get them all right. I don’t think in the future we’ll get them all right either because we’re not perfect.”
He didn’t speak too much about Ashworth, most likely because of legal reasons.
“If we’re talking about our industry, I think we just have to say chemistry. But, really, I don’t want to go down that road.”
“With Erik, I think there was an emotional response [post the cup final win against Manchester City]. We get criticised for being unemotional and yet there was a bit of emotion in that decision.”
Ratcliffe added, “Omar [Berrada], you’d only just arrived. Jason (Wilcox) hadn’t been with us very long. We didn’t have many experts in play. Really, I’m not an expert. And it was hard to extract him [Erik] from the former management set-up.”
Ten Hag is currently on a break away from football as he ponders the next step of his career. Meanwhile, Ashworth has been working with Warwickshire County Cricket Club, advising on performance strategy.
Ashworth has been linked to sporting director roles at Arsenal and more recently, West Ham United.
Featured image Michael Regan via Getty Images
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