Why Erik ten Hag can be a success as Bayer Leverkusen’s risky hire | OneFootball

The club who famously never used to win anything headlined the profile of their new manager: “Experienced trophy collector”. Erik ten Hag might like that, the manager who in his final outing as Manchester United manager insisted the season would be a success if they won the Carabao Cup, even though they were 14th in the Premier League then. Which, Ten Hag may note, means they actually slipped down the table after his sacking.

But now he is Bayer Leverkusen manager, a year after ‘Neverkusen’ ditched their unwanted tag. Their unbeaten German double, their maiden Bundesliga title, their run to the Europa League final all helped forge Xabi Alonso such a reputation that he was targeted by Bayern Munich, of interest to Liverpool and, a year later, hired by Real Madrid.

Ten Hag’s return to football comes with his new and last club forming a contrast: United, with their pretensions to be the biggest in the world, Leverkusen perhaps not even the biggest in the Cologne region of North Rhine-Westphalia. Yet United have become arguably the global game’s greatest underachievers – Ten Hag has some culpability in that – whereas Leverkusen represented the overachievers extraordinaire in 2023-24, ending Bayern’s 11-year reign in the Bundesliga. United can look among the worst run clubs in football, Leverkusen among the best.

Leverkusen have spent recent years getting decisions right; Alonso, after all, was untried in senior management before they hired him. They have turned to Ten Hag to replace the Bernabeu-bound Basque. It is hard to imagine the Premier League runners-up appointing him now, but their Bundesliga counterparts have. But then Ten Hag’s reputation is higher in Germany than England, just as his German is better than his English. It may be a legacy in part of his time with Bayern Munich’s second team, when he was nicknamed “Mini Pep” but he also has admirers at Borussia Dortmund, though Niko Kovac’s heroics in salvaging a Champions League place meant there was no vacancy at the Signal Iduna Park this summer.

Or it may mean the distance from Leverkusen to Old Trafford camouflaged his issues there. Sporting director Simon Rolfes, in his explanation of Ten Hag’s appointment, put more emphasis on his record at Ajax, which means the 55-year-old has won more than Leverkusen, and then referenced “ensuing success at Manchester United under difficult circumstances at times”.

One explanation of Ten Hag’s excellence with Ajax, with three league titles and a Champions League semi-final appearance, is that he was surrounded by the right structure, in director of football Marc Overmars and CEO Edwin van der Sar. Another is that he had the biggest budget the club had ever had.

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Erik ten Hag won two trophies at Man United but can he bring success to Leverkusen as well? (AFP via Getty Images)

Each has a pertinence. Leverkusen should offer the structure United lacked (though part of the rationale they offered for giving him a reprieve after talking to other managers last summer was that he would fare better with the Ineos-led appointments behind the scenes; he didn’t and was sacked a few months later). Financially, though, Leverkusen can never rival Bayern’s wage bill, which proved no impediment to Alonso last season.

Yet they will surely have the largest transfer fund in their history, assuming Florian Wirtz and Jeremie Frimpong join Jonathan Tah in leaving. It would also leave Leverkusen without some of the outstanding figures in their greatest team. Ten Hag’s time at Old Trafford left questions about his judgement of players, if he invariably overrated his fellow Dutchman and Ajax alumni. United had too little to show for a £600m spending spree and yet, somehow, Ten Hag always seemed to think the way of demonstrating ambition was to spend more.

So perhaps the club should make the signings and counsel the manager against the kind of feud he had with Jadon Sancho, which lent little benefit. It will be instructive how much Ten Hag changes; Alonso often preferred a back three, whereas he has tended to favour 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1. After a fine debut season at Old Trafford, Ten Hag’s tactics felt increasingly incoherent at United. Rolfes nevertheless felt he and Leverkusen are a fine fit. “Our ideas of football coincide,” he said. “With technically demanding and dominant football, we want to carry on in the Werkself style.”

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Xabi Alonso turned Leverkusen into a winning side leaving Ten Hag a tough job to replicate (REUTERS)

And part of the job is to simply carry on. Few managers are fortunate enough to inherit a success story; Ten Hag did not at Old Trafford. He does now, even if a two-year contract does not amount to a huge vote of confidence.

Leverkusen’s hope may be that they are getting the Ajax Ten Hag not the United variant. His lone Champions League campaign with United was a shambles, whereas he punched above his weight in taking Ajax to the last four.

It is an achievement that has stood the test of time. It has helped Ten Hag land one of the plumb coaching jobs on offer in Europe this summer. And that, in turn, reflects the peculiar position United may now occupy: those who leave Old Trafford may escape blame for failure. If Ten Hag can argue his record looks rather better now Ruben Amorim is doing significantly worse, Antony and Scott McTominay are the latest examples of players prospering after they left United. For Ten Hag, who hitched his fortunes rather too closely to Antony’s, the task at Leverkusen is twofold. To be a worthy successor to Alonso and the managerial equivalent of Antony.