Following Man Utd’s heavy 3-0 weekend defeat against Liverpool, the odds for Erik ten Hag to be the first casualty of the Premier League season have been cut to 3/1 in the next manager sacked market.
Despite receiving the backing of new co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe in the summer, there is fresh speculation that the Dutchman’s days may be numbered, just three games into the new campaign.
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Ten Hag now the joint-favourite to lose his job
While the 54-year-old did start the season as one of the front runners to lose his job, the odds of Ten Hag getting the chop have been slashed from 9/1 to 3/1. That's a result of a damaging defeat against bitter rivals Liverpool at Old Trafford.
It was the manner of the loss, as much as the defeat itself, that seems to have got punters piling in on Ten Hag to lose his job. Liverpool, in just their third game under new manager Arne Slot, looked much more fluent and settled in what they were trying to do, than United have done at almost any point in Ten Hag’s reign.
While it’s fair to say that Slot didn’t exactly inherit the kinds of problems Ten Hag has been forced to deal with, many United fans appear to be losing patience with the former Ajax boss, with one of his substitutions greeted with jeers on Sunday.
History repeating itself at Old Trafford
This is not the first time that a Manchester United manager has found themselves under serious pressure early on in the season.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was a sack race favourite in the early part of the 2021/22 season, with a humiliating 5-0 home defeat against Liverpool signalling the beginning of the end. Solskjaer’s side did bounce back immediately with a 3-0 win at Spurs the following weekend, but the Norwegian was still out of a job less than a month after the defeat against their great rivals.
A few years previously, Jose Mourinho was also sacked before Christmas in the 2018/19 campaign. His final match was a 3-1 defeat to Liverpool and after this weekend’s defeat, there is a growing sense that history could repeat itself with Ten Hag.
Ten Hag out, Ruud in?
With Ruud van Nistelrooy in as assistant manager at Old Trafford, Ten Hag’s replacement may already be waiting in the wings. Van Nistelrooy is a popular figure with the United fanbase and he does have managerial experience, having won 65% of his games as PSV boss in the 2022/23 season in the Netherlands.
It’s hard to see Ten Hag having a long-term future in Manchester, but it would be a significant U-turn were the new board to pull the trigger so early in the 2024/25 Premier League season, having decided to back the Dutchman in the summer.
Given the manner of Everton’s shocking collapse from a winning position against Bournemouth on Saturday, Sean Dyche still looks the more likely candidate to lose his job first, with the Toffees yet to pick up a point and having conceded 10 goals in their first three games.
In December 2020 we sadly 
