Manchester United coach Erik ten Hag has admitted that the club’s standards have dropped in the past decade, and it will take time for them to start winning league titles again.
The Red Devils were a dominant force during legendary coach Sir Alex Ferguson’s reign. The team last won a league title in 2013, in the Scottish gaffer’s final season in charge before his retirement from football management.
In an interview with AD in the Netherlands, Ten Hag agreed to former United boss Ralf Rangnick’s claims that the club’s standards have dropped amd is no longer in the same level with its rivals like Liverpool and Manchester City.
Ten Hag said: “Rangnick was absolutely right. We’ve been working very hard on that for two years, but he said it just right: it’s a thorough, very complex operation.
”And I knew when I started that it was going to be a tough job. There are a lot of people who have advised me. Louis van Gaal too.
“We want this club back to where it was more than a decade ago, to a club that wins the Premier League, which can win Champions Leagues. We are really a long way away from that, I think.
“I think we’ve taken steps since then, otherwise we wouldn’t have won two prizes either. But we are not yet so far that a ‘winning culture’ already prevails here in all respects. Our standards, our norms and values, still need to go up.”
The Dutch gaffer also hit out at the mentality of the group he inherited, adding: “I was not shocked. But the culture, the mentality was really not good. To win, to really achieve top performance every week, we had to change a lot.”
