Man Utd eyeing “big club manager” who could be their answer to Klopp

Manchester United have endured a season that very few saw coming after Erik ten Hag’s successful first campaign in charge of the club last year.

The former Ajax boss looks worryingly out of his depth with just one win to his name in his last five Premier League games, despite playing Burnley, Sheffield United and Bournemouth in that period.

With the recent arrival of new minority owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his ambitious plans to rejuvenate the club, it does feel like just a matter of time until he’s replaced as manager, and there have been calls to hire a man who could be the club’s own Jürgen Klopp.

Erik ten Hag’s season

It really has been a season from hell for the Dutchman this year, and while the extensive injury list at Carrington is far from ideal and certainly hasn’t helped, the performances on the pitch have been dreadful.

The club were dumped out of the League Cup by Newcastle United in November and crashed out of the Champions League with one win, one draw and four defeats to their name, and in the league, the Red Devils are sitting in sixth place, 13 points off fourth, with a goal difference of plus one.

However, while it might not feel like it to the fans, the three-time European Champions have had a fair bit of luck this term, at least defensively.

According to Understat, they have scored 4.94 fewer goals than would be expected based on expected goals, but have conceded a whopping 15.72 fewer – the highest in the league – which translates to an expected points total of just 42.25, which would put them around 15th based on those metrics.

Now, while some of that overperformance can be put down to the talent of United’s players, the extreme nature of it is more down to luck, luck that has saved a poor season from Ten Hag becoming a genuinely awful one.

With this in mind, it’s not surprising to see so much talk about potential replacements coming in, and according to recent reports, one of the said replacements could be Bayern Munich boss Thomas Tuchel, who has recently been compared to Klopp by a United legend.

Why Thomas Tuchel could be United’s Jürgen Klopp

It might seem like a leap to compare Tuchel to Klopp. After all, the pair now epitomise completely different styles of football – at least in the eyes of English fans – with the former associated with pragmatic and arguably defensive football, while the latter is known for getting his sides to play high-intensity football whenever they can.

However, there are several similarities beyond their ages and nationalities, and former United keeper Peter Schmeichel certainly seems to think so. He described the Bayern boss as having the same “kind of thing that Klopp has” and that as a “big-club manager” he would be able to cope with the pressures of the United job.

That said, what are the similarities between the two Germans?

First, the former Chelsea man has previously followed in the footsteps of the Liverpool boss, taking charge of Mainz and Borussia Dortmund in his wake. Second, the pair are both larger-than-life personalities that seem to command respect wherever they go – or at least for a few years in Tuchel’s case – and if the Krumbach-born gaffer does land the job he would also be walking into an English giant in need of rejuvenation, much like Klopp in 2015.

Lastly, while Tuchel is now seen as a defensively-minded coach by fans in England, he has shown in the past that he is more than happy to play full-throttle football, notably with Dortmund, when his side ended the 2015/16 season with a non-penalty expected goals figure of 78.84, which was 8.62 more than Bayern Munich managed.

With that said, if the 50-year-old is going to replace Ten Hag, how do their managerial records stack up?

Well, in their most recent job, the German comes out ahead, with a points-per-game average of 2.05 to the Dutchman’s 1.95. The gap is even more significant when looking at Tuchel’s stint at Chelsea, as he averaged 2.08 points-per-game in West London.

Ultimately, while Ten Hag did a good job last season, his poor results this season, combined with his genuinely dreadful underlying numbers, suggest that it’s time he moved on.

Therefore, if the Red Devils can get their hands on Tuchel as his replacement, then they should, as while he’s not Klopp, he might be the next best thing.