Is Ten Hag making a near-impossible job even harder?

If you wanted to defend Erik ten Hag, there are plenty of things you could cling to.

His undeniably positive 2022-23 debut season in charge of Manchester United, for example, which brought a trophy and a return to the Champions League places and went about as well as could be realistically expected.

The sheer noise around United is deafening at the best of times, but now even more so with the club’s awful handling of the Mason Greenwood situation, the accusations against Antony, the banishment of Jadon Sancho, fan protests, the ongoing takeover saga: managing an actual football team must be next to impossible amid all of that.

Plus there’s the fact that nobody has been able to make sense of United since Alex Ferguson retired in 2013: David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Ralf Rangnick and Ten Hag have conjured three trophies, two second-place finishes and no convincing title challenges between them in the past decade. Who could succeed when the club is set up as it is, with at best unconvincing leadership from on-high and apathetic owners currently dithering about whether they want to sell?

All of those mitigating factors have to be taken into account when judging the job that Ten Hag is doing.

But boy oh boy, he doesn’t help himself sometimes. Especially with some of the stuff he says in public.

Take his comment, after being convincingly beaten 3-1 at home by Brighton on Saturday that the visitors “spend money too” when the cost of his squad was put to him.

Maybe he wasn’t across the exact cost of the respective starting XIs, but even if he didn’t know that Brighton’s was assembled for around £18million, which is less than United paid for Diogo Dalot alone, he will have known the disparity was stark and that by drawing attention to it he made himself look ridiculous.

Then we can go back to after the Arsenal defeat at the start of this month, when he bemoaned the use of the “wrong camera angle” to determine an offside call that went against Alejandro Garnacho, as if that had anything to do with how offside is judged.

United were well beaten by visitors Brighton (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

And with Sancho: some say he was simply giving a straight answer to a question when he was asked why the England winger wasn’t in the squad for that Arsenal game, that some Dutch people have a reputation for directness and even bluntness. Dutch he may be, but Ten Hag is not an idiot: he must have known that being critical of an individual player in public would lead to problems.

There are other examples, including trying to claim United had actually played well against Brighton, which was at best an optimistic appraisal of the game.

Ten Hag has an incredibly difficult job. Close to impossible, you could say. But he’s making it harder for himself than he needs to.