The Austrian boss was sacked despite Manchester United’s initial plans to keep him as their sporting director.
Manchester United owners got scared of Ralf Rangnick exposing their failures and decided to “get rid of him”, according to Gary Neville.
Rangnick took over as interim manager after Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was fired in December 2021. The club initially planned to keep Rangnick in a consulting role beyond his managerial spell, showing their commitment to making long-term improvements in their transfer strategy. However, the Austrian manager and sporting director ultimately had to leave the club once his six-month spell in charge of the Red Devils ended.
In an interview in April 2022, Rangnick said of United’s issues: “For me, it’s clear it’s not enough to do some little, minor amendments, some little issues here and there, some minor cosmetic things.
“No, in medicine you would see this is an operation at the open heart. So there are more things to be changed than some little things here and some minor things there.”
Neville believes such comments ultimately convinced United’s hierarchy to part ways with Rangnick.
“Ralf Rangnick was going to get the sporting director’s job at the end of the season,” Neville said on the Overlap.
“He said that he needed open heart surgery – he wanted to get rid of like 10 or 12 of them out the club and just rip it all up. They [United] got rid of him because that scared them to death.”
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