A full 20 reasons why Manchester United have sacked Ruben Amorim | OneFootball

Regular readers of these hallowed pages will know that our push for Premier League managerial sackings is generally limited to five, maybe six, reasons why they should be shown the door.

But This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About. So we’ve come up with 20 reasons why they have finally parted ways with Ruben Amorim…

The formation

We would be completely bored of it ages ago if we didn’t actually quite look forward to witnessing the level of exasperation shown by Amorim when asked by a reporter in each and every press conference or post-defeat interview whether he might consider changing his formation.

He maintained, almost entirely on the basis of success at one other football club, that it was not the system that was the problem. This is despite the clear recent evidence suggesting otherwise.

Performances did slightly improve as Amorim made tweaks to cope with injuries, but Man Utd went backwards again before his demise as he reverted to his ineffective formation.

The ‘it worked at Sporting’ argument very simply falls down on the basis of Manchester United not being Sporting, and we do wonder whether Amorim now regrets his early insistence that he would stick with 3-4-3 no matter what.

While he understandably saw a move away from his principles as a respect-dwindling admission of defeat, surely the very real, actual defeats were far more damaging to his reputation.

The philosophy

We’re as culpable as anyone for lumping formation and philosophy together. They go hand in hand – we get it. But it’s also possible for a system to not be working for a team while the wider ethos is apparent. That was not the case here.

Without saying ‘pressing’ or ‘transition’ because literally every f***er with a few magnets on a tactics board would pick those two facets of the game as key to their philosophy, can anyone tell us what Amorim’s core Manchester United principles were? You said ‘overloads’, didn’t you? Get out.

58 points from 47 games

Of the ever-present Premier League teams since Amorim’s appointment, only Spurs, West Ham United and Wolves have a lesser total…

Resignation threats

Like a p*ssed up bloke down the pub going nose to nose with you looking for any excuse for a rumble, he’s f***ing asked for it.

After being talked down from a ledge after a 3-1 defeat to Brighton in January, when he told United bosses he was ‘prepared to resign’, reports continued to suggest Amorim may walk before he’s pushed, but he opted to stick around for his £12m compensation.

Lost the Europa League final

Erik ten Hag kept his job because Manchester United won the FA Cup final. Sure, it was maybe the only time in the entirety of his second season at Old Trafford when performance and result came together, and it was absolute madness to hand him a new contract on the back of it, but it was a trophy, and one they claimed by beating very much the best team in England at the time in Manchester City.

Amorim didn’t win a trophy and lost to the 17th best team in England, managed by a guy whose only three victories in his last 15 games in all competitions for Tottenham and now Nottingham Forest came in that final and the two semi-finals against Bodo/Glimt.

Kobbie Mainoo

Mainoo’s teammates were ‘perplexed’ at him being sidelined by Amorim, Gary Lineker was “really worried” about him being “dismissed” and “baffled” by him not starting, and so too was Owen Hargreaves, who quite rightly said he was United’s “best player by a country mile” having come off the bench in September’s defeat to Manchester City at the Etihad.

Amorim felt he was “helping” Mainoo, but it’s hard to see how and the academy graduate must have been similarly confused as to why he’s not played in a team performing so poorly. Just how bad do they have to be for him to be given a fair chance?

He was told by Amorim that it’s either him or Bruno Fernandes, but we refuse to accept that Mainoo – ill-suited or not – would fail to do a better job alongside the Manchester United captain than competition winner Manuel Ugarte, and it’s not as though Fernandes himself has been in undroppable form.

Not only are United terrible, but there’s no place in the team for someone deemed by many to be the future of the club. It was not a good look.

Public condemnation

It was supposedly an obsession with Amorim’s charisma which played no small part in Ratcliffe and INEOS plumping for him as their manager, and he would probably have been out of the job earlier if it wasn’t for that charm. It makes him a very difficult man to dislike and there’s no doubting his ability to hold the room.

But if anything, he’s honest to a fault, and we can’t imagine Ratcliffe and the INEOS bosses were too enamoured with him besmirching the great name of Manchester United.

Heralding this as “the worst team in Manchester United history” can’t be good for the share price.

Centre-back subs

“How are you supposed to adapt to a situation when you’re changing it constantly?!” a genuinely irritated Micah Richards asked on Match of the Day, accompanied by a graphic showing the scattergun changes Amorim made in an attempt to rescue a point against Brentford, which ended with Mason Mount at left wing-back in one of the more laughable examples of his 3-4-3 obstinacy.

We can just about give him a pass for a bit of substitution chaos to turn a game on its head, but what we could not fathom is his insistence on changing at least one of his centre-backs in every single game.

Premier League prize money

Some reports suggest sacking Amorim is going to cost the club £12m. For the 2024/25 season, the difference in prize money was around £2.7m per position, meaning any new manager would need to make a five-place improvement on whatever Amorim might achieve this season for his sacking to make fiscal sense. Yer da could do that.

Rasmus Hojlund

It really is amazing just what a tonic not being at Manchester United is. After finding the net on debut for Napoli, Hojlund now has 12 goal involvements in 21 games.

He has showcased that he is a Proper Striker this season, with the Napoli loanee producing finishes that many Manchester United fans will have been expecting from him when Amorim arrived at the club. He’s got a not dissimilar profile to Viktor Gyokeres, who banged goals in for fun under Amorim in Portugal.

Instead what they got was a clearly talented striker brought to Manchester United ruined by a manager who – as Benjamin Sesko is now also evidence for – doesn’t know how to get the ball to them.

“Out-schooled” by a novice

In Keith Andrews’ eighth game as a football manager he “out-schooled” Amorim. His tactics weren’t revolutionary – they didn’t need to be.

Brentford recycled passes between their defenders while every now and again playing the ball into midfield to draw United on to them. When the United midfielders stepped out to press, Jordan Henderson or someone else played a long ball up to Igor Thiago, who then had what turned out to be the very simple task of bullying one, two or all three centre-backs to win free-kicks, create chances and score goals with the Red Devils midfield nowhere to be seen.

As Alan Shearer said, Amorim made life “easy” for Andrews and every other manager he came up against as they knew exactly how United were going to play.

Oliver Glasner… or (nearly) anyone else

Glasner is currently the bookies favourite to replace Amorim and would apparently take the job “in a heartbeat”. More fool him.

The Austrian makes a lot of sense, not least because of the wonderful progress he’s made at Palace, first without Michael Olise and now without Eberechi Eze, but also because he’s showing that 3-4-3 can work in the Premier League and his contract expires at the end of the season.

Gareth Southgate is also in the running favourite and we can see why he’s Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s pick, but as Jamie Carragher said, “the problem for Ruben Amorim is that every other Premier League manager would look at it and say, ‘I could do a better job than that.'”

Manchester United DNA

Haven’t heard this nonsense in a while, have we? And we wonder whether that’s because the football Amorim had United playing was so far removed from the fabled Manchester United DNA that the genetics of the football club are no longer even considered as part of the ‘what’s wrong with United’ rhetoric.

Ole back at the wheel, anyone?

Grimsby Town

“Something has to change and you cannot change 22 players,” Amorim said after the historic defeat to League Two Grimsby, in another hint at a possible resignation, having claimed “the players spoke really loud” through their performance.

But the players might argue, as we and a raft of other publications and pundits did, that Amorim rocking from side to side on the bench as his team lost the penalty shootout was a pretty deafening declaration of a more overarching defeat.

The other nadirs

There’s always a rock under the one at the bottom. And while there’s undoubtedly some recency bias involved, with the latest defeat often declared a new nadir to sell a sack story or just because it’s fun to write and read about last week’s “worst Manchester United team in history” being somehow better than this week’s, there may also be a cumulative effect which automatically makes the most recent defeat the new nadir because of the sustained period of sh*te.

Anyway, there were plenty. Grimsby, Brentford, a 2-0 home defeat to Graham Potter’s West Ham, Brentford again, Wolves on Boxing Day…

BLE analysis

Amorim was an absolute gift when it comes to presenting us with images of his and Manchester United’s slow death. Aside from smiling pictures in press conferences or while walking into the stadium before the latest crushing blow, there are three stock Amorim photos available for selection: shouty, gesticulating Amorim; crouched down, head-in-hands Amorim; looking down, deep-in-thought Amorim.

We love, love, love that he was asked about that last one after the Brentford defeat, dismissing it as “nothing” and “something I’ve always done”, but we will always choose to side with the body language experts drafted in to give their hot takes.

“You can see him crouched down in a fetal position, almost like what a baby does,” said the Mirror’s crack BLE. “Imagine if someone was about to get beaten up, that’s the first stance they adopt. They go on the ground and put themselves in a fetal position.”

Marcus Rashford

You’ve got to wonder if, while watching Rashford score a brilliant brace for Barcelona against Newcastle in the Champions League, Ratcliffe and the INEOS bosses considered the possibility that they may have backed the wrong horse.

Rashford would very likely still be a Manchester United player if it was not for Amorim, and is currently performing at a higher level than any of the forwards currently in the Red Devils squad, as he did at Aston Villa last season.

After all of that contrived nonsense in the media about Barcelona sending him back to Old Trafford after a couple of games, he’s now asserted himself as a starter in one of the best teams in Europe, contributing a stunning total of eleven goals and seven assists.

Tallying mistakes

“I think he’s still in a job, because I think the powers that be on Manchester United have made that many mistakes so far and decisions that they’ve made on and off the pitch that they almost don’t want to admit right now, that they’ve made another,” Jamie Carragher said on Monday Night Football.

Sounds about right, but we put it to Ratcliffe and the Manchester United powers that be that by not admitting to the mistake of hiring Amorim, they made another in not sacking him for so long.

There have been a helluva lot of mistakes though…

Lost the dressing room

It was reported in September that Amorim was ‘losing the confidence of the dressing room’ as players ‘questioned his refusal to pivot mid-match, with his tactics struggling against the Premier League’s relentless pace’, and we’re not convinced that an Enzo Maresca and Robert Sanchez-inspired victory over Chelsea would have outweighed a Brentford defeat (and subsequent lows) in the dressing room confidence stakes since.

Embarrassment

For Amorim, Ratcliffe, the players, the fans, the cabal of Manchester United pundits, it is really just quite embarrassing just how bad at football they have been over the past 14 months. And yes, it is also quite embarrassing to spend £200m on new players for a manager only to sack him a couple of months later, but what’s the alternative? Wade through this sh*te until January or the summer and spend another wedge of cash on the next raft of ill-advised souls doomed to fail at Old Trafford?

We understand that Amorim was not solely to blame – there are at least five other culprits – but there really was no one more to blame for this mess. He has been .