FEBravo I think it's an amazing leap forward in football leadership.
As Deleuze and Guattari might once have put it, ten Hag is the coach who "coaches by not coaching" … ten Hag's genius is the unmediated and ceaselessly mobile embodiment of the point at which tactics and instruction, those callow and inadequate representations of the footballing real, fail—a point of failure that grounds the virtual being of the "football manager" as such.
Ten Hag's are the tactics that deterritorialise all other tactics, and indeed any false rationality that appears to enliven mechanical tacticity at all. This is a "total football" indeed, but not the fantasy of total control: instead one whose asymptote is the image of a total escape, a totally liberated footballistic desire. As the Guardian analyst puts it:
Elite-level players are used to being put under pressure, they’re used to being closed down, they’re used to opponents pressing. Space alarms them. It makes them uneasy. It makes them think too much.
The transgressive nomadology of ten Hag's footballing war machine is therefore unstoppable. United under ten Hag ask questions not Socratically, not like a lawyer attempting cross-examination, but rather like the character of Colombo incarnated so brilliantly by Peter Falk in the eponymous television series. The movements of his players are like a stream of casual non sequiturs that refuse meaning-making, under the schizo-flux of which the neurotic, and fundamentally criminal psychology of the opposition inevitably crumbles.
Observe how the hapless Quansah, encountering a United attack with methods as opaque and comedic as a carnival mask, gifted the ball to the ambiguous Fernandes, and thereby sent the hosts back into the lead against the backdrop of Old Trafford's social revolt, the thin veil over which makes all the more public an alluring barbarism that nevertheless cannot yet be admitted by the technocrats of the so-called Premier League.
The one who understands ten Hag should hardly be disturbed by the speculative threat of a reimposition of order in chaos heralded by the ominously named INEOS … the very name of its prophet and executioner, Ratcliffe or "rat cliff", a portmanteau reinscribing the established pattern of lemming-like suicide at United which now stands in a homeostatic, reciprocal self-determination, a hyperstitional co-becoming with Erik ten Hag himself, together a hypersigil whose activation of the virtual contradiction of "success" and "failure" transcends any such dour categories with declarations such as:
"It’s very disappointing when you put yourselves three times in a winning position just before the end of the game, but then drop points"
or
"All three games had poor decisions and not every time the same players … what is not helping is we have 26 different shapes in the backline"
With his "threes", ten Hag gestures to the internal absurdity of binary assessments such as "disappointment" or "drop points", and with his "26", to the inadequacy of the letters of the Roman alphabet to anything more than an oppressive and incomplete "Royal science" of football, a sport whose mutable, shapeshifting character is now laid bare.
How can any conventional manager imagine the overcoming of such a non-configuration? It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the final defeat of Erik ten Hag.
