United suffered a dismal defeat at Newcastle on Saturday. The 1-0 scoreline was not a fair reflection on the match, which ended the Red Devils’ three-game winning run in the Premier League.
Ten Hag’s side are on the cusp of exiting the Champions League at the group stage and must beat Bayern Munich next week to have any chance of progression. They have suffered six defeats in their opening 14 league matches and have failed to beat any team currently in the top 10.
Ratcliffe’s investment into United is set to be confirmed next week. Shearer says there is a chance Ten Hag will be sacked within weeks of his arrival being confirmed.
He believes the writing is on the wall for the Dutchman due to an obvious problem in the dressing room. Shearer said on The Rest is Football Podcast: “Normally when new ownership comes in, a lot of the time that means a new manager. Whenever that’s after a week or three or four weeks, it normally means a change is there.
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“They have [kept sacking managers] and look where they are now! Whether they’ll do that again remains to be seen.
“But clearly there’s, you don’t have to be a genius to work it out, clearly there’s an issue in that dressing room. You can see when the arms go up when it’s not my fault and players try to send a reaction to their own fans to say ‘This is not my fault’.
“And as soon as that happens, you just know that there’s an issue in the dressing room. And that happened too many times on Saturday.”
Shearer does not think there is a quick fix to United’s problems. He says some of their recent mega-money buys showcase the bad situation they are in.
He added: “I don’t see [major improvement] happening anytime soon. It’s a long-term job, it’s been a long-term job already.
“They haven’t been where they want to be for a number of years now. And eventually what happens is that it comes down onto the pitch and that’s been there for a while.
“The money that they’ve spent, some of the players that they’ve spent money on, Antony and [Jadon] Sancho… when you look at [Marcus] Rashford’s performance on Saturday it looked as if he didn’t want to be there at all.
“You’ve spent £70m on Sancho, you’ve spent £80m on Antony and they can’t get in the team for whatever reason. That sort of sums it up at Manchester United for me.”
