At the precise moment in which Ruben Amorim sits down in the armchair of the Elland Road press room, his “Hi guys” addressed to journalists seems like the classic greeting of that friend who doesn’t want to say hello, doesn’t want to know how you are, doesn’t care about your cats or what you had for lunch, he just wants to tell you how bad his day was. His face doesn’t betray who knows what disturbance, but already in his words we can sense the sense of annoyance he feels in sitting in front of journalists at that moment.
At that moment Manchester United had just left the Leeds field with a draw that was also quite casual and Amorim himself seemed overall happy with the match, he praised his attackers and genuinely defended the decision to sell Hojlund to take Sesko – even if, it must be said, it would have been the opposite – but he always does so with a modest tone, he often sighs, touches his beard and then finally explodes when one of the journalists asks him about the transfer market.
At that moment Amorim lets out a phrase that will certainly have sounded stranger to those present than to the public: «I came here to be the manager of Manchester United, not thetrainer”. A statement in itself not absurd, you might think, if it weren’t for the fact that Ruben Amorim is – or rather, was – the first Head Coach in the history of Manchester United, which in 146 years of existence, that is until 2024, has always been led by a First Team Manager. Naturally, the difference, it is now more or less clear, lies in the tasks of managing the staff: being a manager means actively deciding on the market and issuing such a statement with the transfer market open almost seems like an attempted coup d’état for someone who only appears in United’s organization chart as “First Team Head Coach”.
With him, however, Manchester United had actually tried to take a different path. In addition to the choice to reduce his range of action in the club, the feeling was that Ratcliffe really wanted to change United’s image. From his first day in Manchester literally until his last, Amorim showed himself as a novel figure for United, even somatically. Try taking a photo of Amorim, with smooth facial skin, hair still thick and black and a beard that seems drawn in pencil, and place it next to those of Ten Hag, Solskjaer, Mourinho, van Gaal and Moyes. Sure, every now and then he seemed overcome by despair, and forced to shoulder Manchester United’s suffering like a Christ, but he seemed to have a different level of empathy than his predecessors.
At the same time, Ratcliffe, who joined in the summer of 2024 as a minority shareholder but with responsibility for the technical area, tried to rebuild the entire United sporting management: in a few months, first a new CEO, Omar Berrada, then a new head of the scouting area, Jason Wilcox and a new sporting director, Dan Ashworth, arrived. Ironically, the latter was the only board member against Amorim’s choice and lasted just five months before leaving the club, only to be replaced by Wilcox.
Even on the pitch Amorim tried to impose a different approach. Having joined a United team filled with former Ajax players by ten Hag, designed to play with a 4-3-3 set in stone, he immediately tried to turn everything upside down to fit eleven bodies into his 3-4-2-1. In other contexts, such an ambitious attempt to introduce his idea of football into a club that has struggled tremendously for years to build one would have appeared to be a very intelligent move. In this case it ended up going around and becoming a carbon copy signed crucifixion to his contract.
His rigidity has been a condemnation practically since his arrival and has forced him to seek even bizarre technical compromises in order not to distort his idea. As was also predictable, except for a few moments of brilliance, Amorim failed to produce a valid result in the long term and, on the contrary, gave much more of a sense of instability. In just over a year Amorim has tried more or less everything to try to give shape to his team: since his arrival Mazraoui has played in almost perfect alternation as a full-back winger and as a central third; Dalot changed his area of expertise almost weekly; Mount and Bruno Fernandes regularly danced between the lines and if, on the one hand, the performance level of these players never really changed, demonstrating overall a certain flexibility, on the other, not being able to build a very codified game system immediately played against his experience, giving him the cross of a project that had already been born in the wrong way.
Despite all the difficulties he experienced, especially in the first season, however Amorim never lost the desire to build something: by insisting on his ideas he still built a Manchester United which this season has shown itself, albeit partially, credible. And, with all the irony of the case, which symbolizes the state of Manchester United, his ideas seemed to take root just when his sacking arrived.
As Laurie Whitwell explains on The Athletic, what caused everything to explode – as happened between Maresca and Chelsea – was in fact an internal dispute between Amorim and the new DS Wilcox, which occurred just a few days before the match against Leeds and which, one might think, was precisely at the basis of that attempt at blow searched by Portuguese.
However, what emerges from this reconstruction, not surprisingly, is how United remains a dysfunctional, if not downright toxic, context. According to Whitwell, in fact, both Wilcox and Ratcliffe himself have repeatedly tried to impose different tactical solutions on Amorim, only to receive as a response the Portuguese’s desire to change the squad more radically or to fire him. And as often happens in such dysfunctional contexts, Ratcliffe did not live up to his attempt to revolutionize United in a profound way, preferring instead a quick solution: eliminating the manager on whom he invested a £10 million release clause and to whom he will still owe a similar sum for the remaining 18 months of his contract.
As happens regularly, United find themselves back to square one. In the next two games the former midfielder, Darren Fletcher, who until a few days ago coached the Under 18s will be on the bench – curiously now his sons, Jack and Tyler are in the first team – and alongside him will be Jonny Evans, who was a United player until June, while in the background there is a possible return of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer or even Michael Carrick. Obviously the identity rhetoric has started again: a video in which Fletcher says he shows his youngsters videos of Manchester United of Ferguson playing vertically, because that is the DNA of the club. In short, the feeling is that United’s management and specifically Ratcliffe – who, apparently, is a listener of Gary Neville’s podcast – wants to bring back a certain sense of belonging within the club, all while the technical area is entrusted to two former Manchester City managers.
So now United are faced with the prospect of the fifth former player of the Ferguson era called upon to act as ferryman. If we wanted to use a bit of cynicism, we could summarize the post-Ferguson United (of which you can read a reconstruction here) in an alternation of ambitious technical projects and former players called in to patch things up when everything starts to fall apart. And meanwhile the team continues to crumple on its absurdities, filling itself with interesting players who end up going crazy and trying to escape and then return to higher levels elsewhere, think of McTominay, Antony, Rashford and now also Højlund. Furthermore, in recent weeks Mainoo and Zirkzee seem to want to add themselves to this list despite the change in the bench, a sign of the fact that their problem was probably not even the manager but Manchester United as an entity.
Furthermore, compared to last year, in which United always gravitated above the relegation zone, Amorim left the club just at the moment in which, for the first time since 2023, United’s ranking seemed to acquire a fair amount of value, given that Red Devils they are level on points with fifth-placed Chelsea and just three points behind fourth-placed Liverpool, having also beaten both in the first half of the season. To make the picture even more tragicomic, United still don’t seem to have decided how to manage the post-Amorim period: the idea of a ferryman until the end of the season is very concrete – hence the names of Solskjaer and Carrick – but the club management doesn’t seem to have a plan in hand, in a totally similar way to what happened 14 months ago, when the choice of Amorim came after two weeks in which Van Nistelrooy sat on the bench, producing 3 wins and a draw in what has been United’s best run of results in the last two seasons.
The broader reflection, however, should be dedicated to Amorim himself, who from this year in Manchester emerges emotionally worn out and with a reputation to be rebuilt in more or less the same way as all his predecessors. And what makes everything more disturbing is that none of them managed to rebuild real credibility at that level. Even those who produced good seasons after freeing themselves from United – namely Moyes and Mourinho – had to do so at an increasingly lower level and with increasingly worse prospects.
Amorim has age on his side and the ability to bury these months under other experiences and other successes, but these fourteen months, born badly and ended even worse, must also serve as a warning to whoever will replace him: coaches of all kinds have failed in Manchester: from serial winner Mourinho to the consummate tactician Ten Hag, from the veteran van Gaal to the young Amorim. All of them have had, sooner or later, to deal with a neurotic environment, intoxicated by the words of their former players – Neville and Keane above all – and with an increasingly unclear management structure, in which the right order with which to build a team always seems to be missing. Despite a continuous succession of established and successful managers, now more than ever Manchester United is a headless club, in which a minority shareholder decides the fate of the team while the majority shareholders pocket the dividends. In which a sense of belonging is sought on the pitch by placing the team in the hands of two Manchester City managers. At this point whoever answers the call from this club, be it Glasner, Iraola, Maresca will have to start asking themselves if becoming Manchester United manager is truly a step forward in their career.
