The writing has been on the wall for quite some time. Ruben Amorim’s managerial head coaching stint at Manchester United never really got off the ground. You can blame a lot of different things for it but the bottom line is he won 15 of his 47 Premier League games in charge - a 32 percent win rate was never going to pass muster. He lost four more games than he won and only won consecutive games once.
Amorim is an ideologue who came to Old Trafford with a different ideology than United had ever seen before. His commitment to that ideology was steadfast, even if there were potential flaws within it.
His system never took. As time went on it became obvious that it wasn’t just the lack of suitable players preventing the system from working, but the system itself. It wasn’t ready to scale up to a league far better than the Portuguese league he had been dominating.
No one system is the be all end all magical elixir for football. Every system can be stopped with the right tactics. The best systems tend to work not just because they have the right players, but usually the best players. When coaches don’t have the best players the ones who try to shoehorn what they have into a system tend to fail while the ones who try to figure out a system to utilize what they have tend to have a better chance at success.
Teams began exposing the flaws in Amorim’s system with the same tactical plans every week. Early in the season Fulham, Grimsby, and Burnley all used similar tactics to score goals and pick up results - or nearly pick up results - against United. As recently as the past month we saw Everton, West Ham, and Aston Villa all deploy the same basic tactical structure that Amorim failed to have an answer for.
United’s underlying numbers have started to improve as of late - they did have a favorable schedule but there is no argument that the numbers got better. However results did not follow.
United have won just three of their last 11 games. In that span they’ve thrown away leads to Nottingham Forest, Spurs, West Ham, and Wolves. United were unbeaten when scoring first this year but their record when scoring first was seven wins and six draws. That’s simply not good enough.
Being the manager, or head coach, of Manchester United is more than just about what happens on the pitch. How you hold yourself in public and represent the club matters. From the start there has been an arrogance from Amorim that was just never backed up on the pitch.
That arrogance has bleed into his decision making with his insistence on not playing certain players or refusing to tweak things that are blatantly not working. Given his inability to make in game adjustments to Everton, West Ham, and Aston Villa all using the same tactics (this is only the most recent example) it garners the question as to whether he even can make those tweaks. Arrogance may rub people the wrong way, but incompetence cannot be allowed to persist.
Amorim spoke of needing to suffer and he spoke of it often. When things weren’t going well he threatened to quit, numerous times. It’s understandable why some got exhausted with it.
Amorim’s first big move was to go after Marcus Rashford, an academy graduate and one of United’s highest paid players. Amorim made a statement when he dropped Rashford for the Manchester Derby.
United’s smash and grab 90th minute win that day emboldened Amorim. What immediately followed though was four straight defeats, winless in six in all competitions, and United breaking their record for most losses in December. It would take six weeks for a United player to overtake Rashford for the most goals scored in the Ruben Amorim era.
Manchester United ultimately reached the right decision to stem the bleeding and let Amorim go. He is not the right guy to lead the club long term and it’s better to admit your mistake and move on than stick with a bad decision just because. The fact that United have previously hired (and subsequently sacked) the wrong guy time and time again over the past decade is not a reason to ride it out with another wrong choice. It is a good reason to re-evaluate your hiring practices though.
While United (finally) reached this decision, the way they got there leaves a lot more questions on the competency of INEOS than answers.
Amorim should have been sacked following the Europa League final in Bilbao. It’s not that United lost that game but how they lost. Spurs took three shots in the first half - rather they took three shots all game. Sitting on a 1-0 lead Spurs dropped back and just let United have the ball.
It wasn’t just that United couldn’t do anything - breaking down low blocks is hard - it was the lack of ideas from Amorim. Kobbie Mainoo, who had been called an attacking player by Amorim, only came on in the 90th minute. With five minutes to go Amorim’s idea for a change was replacing Noussair Mazraoui with Diogo Dalot. Chasing a goal, Amorim still played with five defenders and a defensive midfielder for 89 minutes!
This wasn’t the first time Amorim had done these things but doing it when the stakes were at their highest was a pretty good indication that Amorim might not have other ideas, or that he might struggle to adjust to different situations a Manchester United gaffer will find themselves in.
He could have been sacked three games into this season when United bowed out of the League Cup to Grimsby Town. Grimsby got a deserved 2-0 lead when their tactical plan isolated United’s wide center backs leaving them too much ground to cover. With United chasing the match Amorim would eventually flood the pitch with attacking players, but Mason Mount was deployed as a left wing back. Another indication of Amorim’s inability to change the shape to adjust to the circumstances.
For me, the final nail in the coffin was the 1-0 loss to 10 man Everton. Down to 10 men, Everton were still able to expose the flaws in Amorim’s system.
The idea of a back three is to create overloads and so there is always a spare man. Everton dictated the situation by never marking the outside center backs, essentially turning these defensive players into the “spare man.”
Amorim never reacted to this. He never changed the shape, he never removed a defender to bring on a more attacking player and take advantage of the fact that they were leaving them wide open. That match was a clear sign that Amorim was not the man for the long term. His inability to make in game tactical adjustments would forever doom him.
Results should have dictated that Amorim have been let go a while ago but it wasn’t the results that did him in, it was the fact that Amorim publicly went against his bosses, even name dropping Jason Wilcox, in a press conference. No one publicly criticizes their bosses and lives to tell about it but acting now screams that United couldn’t see the writing on the wall and simply moved because some men in suits got their feelings hurt.
Regular Kwestthoughts readers know I’ve been skeptical of INEOS for quite some time now. Many fans falsely convinced themselves that you couldn’t possibly get worse than the Glazers/Ed Woodward/John Murtough and blindly backed every decision INEOS made. Like all fans, I want to believe these guys know what they’re doing but I was never going to blindly assume they did.
The dirty laundry is now out there for the world to see.
This is an ownership group that has hardly put in a correct foot since they took over.
Their first major decision surrounded the future of Erik Ten Hag. Despite winning the FA Cup, the Dutchman should have been sacked following the 2023-24 season. INEOS not so quietly flirted with nearly every hot name coach in Europe that summer before deciding not to sack Ten Hag and trigger the one year extension on his contract.
They then spent a further £200 million on more players Ten Hag wanted, including several more who had previously worked with him only to sack him three months later.
A year later United spent another £200 million in the summer transfer window with their two marquee signings being “Premier League proven,” win-now attackers right in the middle of their prime to give Amorim an immediate boost. Six months later they’ve again sacked the coach.
United chose Amorim because of the fact that he had an identifiable system that he believed in. They hired him because they believed in that system. A year later they were telling him he needed to change that system.
When the club were deciding on who should take over and leaning towards Amorim, Sporting Director Dan Ashworth spoke out against the move, saying that Amorim’s style was not the right fit for the club and the squad. Ashworth was promptly let go.
This was a guy who United paid £3 million to Newcastle to get him off his gardening leave. Five months later they were sacking him for literally doing his job.
In his place rose Jason Wilcox. Wilcox had been appointed Director of Football at Southampton in January of 2023. He held that position for about 15 months until moving to United in April 2024 as the technical director. Roughly seven and a half months later Wilcox was now the sporting director and six months after that he was promoted to Director of Football when Sir Dave Brailsford left.
Has there ever been a faster rise through the ranks? Looking back at his time at Southampton and United and what in the world has this guy done to suddenly be qualified to be Director of Football? Sir Jim Ratcliffe has spoken about wanting to hire the “best football minds” but within a year and a half his director of football was someone with almost no experience in the role. INEOS have only been in charge of United for two years an in that time the hierarchy has changed drastically.
None of this screams “well run football club.” If we read between the lines perhaps we can see the real reason that Wilcox has risen through the ranks so quickly.
Just over a year ago Ashworth was sacked for being the dissenting opinion against who Sir Jim wanted to appoint as head coach. The Athletic then reported that Sir Dave Brailsford is the only person who “talks honestly with Ratcliffe.” Brailsford went “all in” on United, even moving his family from Monaco to Manchester. Just a few months later it was announced that Brailsford would be stepping back from his duties at United, replaced by Wilcox.
It would appear that Sir Jim Ratcliffe has gone from surrounding himself with the best football minds and competent people to surrounding himself with people who simply agree with him. The entire thing has become a clown show and puts a cloud over this entire situation.
United were able to come to the right decision on Amorim but in doing so they’ve exposed the levels of incompetence that radiate through the hierarchy. Given this incompetence why should we have any faith that they’ll get the next decision right?
The last two years that the behind the scenes at Manchester United is as big a clown show as ever. The way they came to this decision eliminates any faith that ownership will get the next decision right or that things are going to get better. The only faith it inspires is the belief that the clown show will keep rolling on.
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Excellent take. It's great that Amorim left, but what now?
Ratcliffe is doing a terrible job and I wish he would just give the lead back to the Glazers. At least the Glazers weren't making the employees hungry and taking money away from retired players.
Amorin would qualify as a purist but one who hasn't even perfected his art. Purists are cognitively inflexible but the ones who are genius at their singular art still often manage to stamp their footprint in history. I don't think he's even the best in the execution of the tactic he was wedded to.