Eva Olid is a manager with a philosophy. How she implements it at Man Utd will define her tenure
Maya Le Tissier didn’t mince her words. Manchester United’s 5-0 home defeat by Chelsea was, she said, “awful”.
Players hurt in such times. The tears from at least one member of the United team following the final whistle 10 days ago were evidence of that.
“Honest conversations” between staff and players “about how we want to play” followed, said United captain Le Tissier after her side’s 1-1 draw at Arsenal on Saturday. “And, yeah, we’ve come out a different team tonight.”
Le Tissier wasn’t wrong.
United arrived at the Emirates Stadium to face Arsenal having conceded seven goals in their first two matches of the season and while scoring just once.
By losing both matches, they were suffering their worst start to a Women’s Super League (WSL) campaign since promotion in 2019. They did not look comfortable with the possession-based, attacking football new head coach Eva Olid has been trying to implement since starting work in early August.
United left north London with a deserved point, a sense, even, of two points dropped following a disciplined, organised and confident defensive display almost unrecognisable from the preceding 2-1 and 5-0 losses to London City Lionesses and Chelsea respectively.
The Arsenal game suggested Olid had taken a pragmatic approach, recognising the difficulty not only of ushering in a new era of attacking football with an almost entirely unchanged squad but doing so in one of the world’s most competitive women’s football leagues, against two of the four toughest opponents within that division.
The honest conversations mentioned by Le Tissier were a factor. Players voiced displeasure with previous performances and setups, specifically the limited possession and impact in attack: United averaged 37.2 per cent possession against Chelsea and 39.8 per cent against London City, while registering xG (expected goals) returns of 0.20 and 0.25 respectively.
The more defensive approach against Arsenal — specifically a low-to-mid-block – was predominantly driven by Olid and members of staff, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter, who spoke anonymously to protect their positions.
Olid dropped 69-cap England international Ella Toone for a more compact midfield of Hinata Miyazawa, Simi Awujo and Julia Zigiotti-Olme. Left-back Anna Sandberg was reinstated to handle the threat of Arsenal right-winger Olivia Smith, while Andrea Medina — more of an attacking full-back than a defensive one but still able to track back and defend — was utilised as a left-winger instead of Sweden forward Monica Jusu Bah, who remained unused on the bench throughout.
As the graphics below demonstrate, United’s passing network resembles that of the goalless draw earned in this same fixture in January under Olid’s predecessor Marc Skinner. It echoes Olid’s pre-match sentiments that she didn’t want her players to “sacrifice” what they were so good at before (defensive intensity) for a new style.
Is it an issue that Olid has so quickly moved away from the philosophy she brought to United in the summer? One source from a rival club described the shift as a “concern”, a kind of failure of a manager’s philosophical backbone. Another queried the long-term impact if players are able to influence tactics.
But adaptation, by definition, is not negative. That Olid should be malleable so soon should come as no deep shock, according to those who watched the Spaniard with her previous team, Hearts in Scotland.
“That’s a sign of a really good coach — knowing that it’s going to take time and being really adaptable,” says Sean Burt, who worked as Olid’s assistant manager for two seasons at the Edinburgh side before becoming their head of recruitment in 2024. “That’s what she was at Hearts throughout her time.”
Indeed, for Burt, the Arsenal draw exemplified Olid’s strengths as a manager that have been overlooked amid United’s poor start to the season.
Olid arrived at Hearts in 2021, having previously coached in her homeland and the United States, with a clear and ambitious possession-based playing philosophy. In fact, her appointment was largely the result of that ambition.
Joe Savage, the Scottish club’s sporting director at the time, recalls that when they were recruiting for a new women’s manager, Olid — then an academy coach with the Houston Dynamo of MLS, with no head-coaching experience — sent across a presentation featuring footage of Hearts’ players.
“We had no idea how she got it, as it wasn’t on Wyscout,” Savage tells The Athletic. “It was grainy footage, but she was describing exactly what she would coach, how she’d move the players: have a higher line, have more players in the middle, create overloads. She’d done so much homework on the club and the city, despite us being bottom of the league and part-time.”
That presentation was enough to convince Savage to hire her, though not everyone agreed, given her limited CV. “I remember some of the staff saying, ‘Is she worth all this visa hassle?’, but I knew she was going to change this club,” Savage says.
Olid turned “a part-time, long-ball team who couldn’t keep possession”, as Savage puts it, into a positional team swimming in confidence and game intelligence.
The transformation required patience and some pragmatism, says Burt.
According to Savage, in 2024, Olid’s overall budget sat at around £300,000 ($400,000) per year — a fraction of that for the top sides in Scottish women’s football such as Glasgow City, Rangers, Celtic or Hibernian. Players with profiles suited to Olid’s principles were in limited supply or unavailable to Hearts, given that budget.
In her early seasons, Burt recalls Olid deploying a 3-4-3 instead of her preferred 4-3-3 or a 4-2-3-1, a bid to wrest control of the pitch’s middle despite the attacking threat forfeited.
That adaptation remained a hallmark of Olid’s time with Hearts, especially in her 2025-26 title-winning season.
With six matches remaining in the league, Hearts clinched a 1-0 win against Glasgow City, a team they had twice failed to beat in the preceding months. They did so by deploying a back three and playing more compact, counter-attacking football. For the next four matches, Hearts persisted with this style, whether via a back three or with two compact banks of four.
By the time they secured the championship in May, Hearts ranked fourth in the league for possession (56.8 per cent) and second for build-up attacks, but also second for shots from fast breaks, set-piece goals and short passes, while being first for direct attacks and total goals (85) — a mix of metrics which demonstrates the blend of principles under Olid.
“They didn’t lose their fundamentals,” says Burt. “They still played possession-based football. They still tried to dominate opponents, just in different areas of the pitch.”
Olid’s blend of principles is also the result of open collaboration with her staff. Gavin Beith, who replaced Burt as her assistant in 2023 and has followed her south to United, often offers challenging or even conflicting ideas.
“One of his biggest strengths is in-game management, knowing when it’s going well, when it’s not going well and how to adapt to the opposition,” Burt says. “They bounce ideas off of each other all the time. Eva having shown that level of adaptability (against Arsenal) will also be an influence from Gavin.”
The importance of tactical flexibility in top-flight football is clear. Modern football has become a bearpit for coaches who, to borrow a line from Real Madrid head coach Jose Mourinho, are willing to “die for an idea”.
That bearpit has devoured plenty of coaches in the English women’s top flight, not least due to the yawning gaps in squad quality.
Tottenham Hotspur’s then manager Robert Vilahamn oversaw a 7-0 defeat by Manchester City in November 2023, and praised his side for “sticking to the game plan” of playing out from the back. Just over a season and a half later, Vilahamn was fired after stubbornly failing to change.
Jens Scheuer was dismissed at Brighton & Hove Albion in March 2023, after failing to secure a win in any of his three WSL matches while playing a brand of attacking football described by many as naive.
Other managers in the women’s game to have perished on this altar include Jean-Luc Vasseur (ditched at Everton following just 10 games in charge in 2022), Robert de Pauw (who lasted six months at Aston Villa in 2024), former Birmingham City manager Marta Tejedor (dismissed after one year in charge in 2020) and Everton boss Brian Sorensen (sacked last season amid criticisms of style, given the squad’s investment).
The most successful managers in the WSL over the past two seasons are those who implemented change gradually while adhering to the league’s demands.
Sonia Bompastor’s 2024-25 debut season at Chelsea after replacing the hugely successful Emma Hayes, in which the former Lyon coach claimed a historic domestic treble, was achieved by not uprooting the team’s style and identity too soon. Only last season, when Chelsea finished third and suffered one of their worst domestic campaigns in WSL history, did Bompastor experiment with a back five while integrating new systems and personnel.
Manchester City counterpart Andree Jeglertz, who won the WSL title in his first season in charge last campaign, followed a similar blueprint, having learned the risks of not doing so in 2009, when he forced Swedish side Djurgardens into front-footed principles, only for a team who were league champions four years earlier to plummet down the table and require “survival football” to avoid relegation.
“When you start with a new group, you need to start where the group is, no matter what ambitions you have,” Jeglertz told The Athletic last season. “(Not doing that at Djurgardens) was the biggest mistake of my career.”
United remain winless in the 2026-27 WSL after three games but those who have watched Olid over the years believe they are in good hands.
“Manchester United are in transition,” says Burt. “There’s no better person than Eva to lead that transition. Regardless of people’s opinions of the Scottish league, to take a team which is amateur and relegation favourites to title winners, that shows the quality level that Hearts reached under Eva.”
Additional reporting by Jordan Campbell
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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