Ten Hag: "I don't really give a shit"

Erik ten Hag and his team were caught in the wheels in Rio de Janeiro. IMAGO/Vitalii Kliuiev

As an outsider, you might initially be taken aback by the score, but after following the game more closely, the result doesn't seem quite so absurd. Bayer 04 Leverkusen suffered a 5-1 defeat against Flamengo's U20s in the first game of the Erik ten Hag chapter. A decisive result in the end, but one that doesn't faze the new Bayer coach.

Rather, the 55-year-old appeared visibly relaxed in the mixed zone after the match: "I knew beforehand that we couldn't field a good team for 90 minutes. But the most important thing was that we stayed fit." It was clearly evident in the first 60 minutes that the time between the players' return from vacation and the first match was too short. "There was no connection, no team. But they'd never played together before," the Dutchman continued.

Ten Hag wasn't wrong. The number of Bundesliga players in the starting eleven could be counted on one hand; instead, most of them came from the club's youth academy—and were also players with little to no experience at a high level. The players also had three days of intensive training under their belts.

The importance of experience became apparent after just under an hour, when ten Hag replaced almost the entire team and brought in established players like Patrick Schick , Alejandro Grimaldo , Granit Xhaka , and Robert Andrich . The latter took control of the game in the center and significantly stabilized the runners-up.

For ten Hag, too, it was "a completely different game from that point on: We dominated and created many chances. But our senior players were also on the pitch. And then you see a different level."

With the "senior players," Leverkusen still managed to score 5-1, but that certainly didn't change the fact that the defeat was a resounding one. Ten Hag wasn't bothered by that. "I don't really care about preseason results," said the Dutchman, explaining what was important to him: "It's about what I saw." And looking back at the final 30 minutes, he noted that a "very good approach" was already evident.