It’s always interesting to look at who might be the best coach in the world. Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp come to mind when you think of Premier League managers, but they have very different achievements.
The knock on Guardiola will always be that he’s simply been given vast amounts of cash to spend so it’s easy to overlook his tactical achievements, while Klopp has spent big here and there, but his work at Liverpool is more impressive in terms of creating the team that he has.
It appears that Erik ten Hag isn’t going to get hundreds of millions to simply buy his way to glory, so it’s going to come down to some outstanding man management to get the best out of players, and he might just be doing that with Anthony Martial.
The French forward has looked heavily disinterested in the past couple of seasons and the game just passes him by far too regularly, but he’s looked hungry this pre-season and has impressed in games, so perhaps the Dutch manager can finally get the best out of him.
It’s even been reported by the Times that ten Hag is happy with what he’s seen from Martial and he thinks he can get consistently great performances out of him, so he’s gone from a surefire departure this summer to actually having a key role to play next year.
If ten Hag can do that with players like Martial, Rashford and Maguire then it would demonstrate that he’s a very good coach, so it will be interesting to see what he can get out of those who underperformed so badly last season.