📝 Why Ruben Amorim was sacked by Manchester United | OneFootball

Manchester United has dismissed Ruben Amorim, so let's review the reasons that have so angered the 'Red Devils' lately.

The Formation

We would have been completely bored a long time ago if we weren't eager to witness the level of exasperation shown by Amorim when a journalist asked him in every press conference or post-defeat interview if he would consider changing his formation.

He insisted, based almost exclusively on his success at another football club, that the problem was not the system. This despite clear recent evidence suggesting otherwise.

Performances improved slightly as Amorim made adjustments to deal with injuries, but Man Utd regressed again before his downfall, as he reverted to his ineffective formation.

The argument that "it worked at Sporting" simply collapses on the basis that Manchester United is not Sporting, and we wonder if Amorim now regrets his initial insistence that he would stick with the 3-4-3 no matter what.

While it's understandable that he saw moving away from his principles as an admission of defeat that would make him lose respect, surely the real and concrete defeats were much more damaging to his reputation.

The Philosophy

We are as guilty as anyone of grouping formation and philosophy. They go hand in hand, we understand. But it's also possible for a system not to work for a team while the general spirit is evident. That wasn't the case here.

Without saying "pressing" or "transition," because literally any fool with a magnet on the tactical board would choose those two facets of the game as keys to their philosophy, could anyone tell us what Amorim's fundamental principles at Manchester United were? You said "overload," didn't you? Out!

58 Points in 47 Matches

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

Resignation Threats

Like a drunk guy at the bar confronting you looking for any excuse for a fight, he brought it on himself.

After being talked out of resigning following the 3-1 defeat to Brighton in January, when he told United bosses he was "ready to resign", reports continued to suggest that Amorim might leave before being pushed, but he chose to stay for his £12 million compensation.

Lost the Europa League Final

Erik ten Hag kept his job because Manchester United won the FA Cup final. Sure, it was perhaps the only time in his entire second season at Old Trafford that performance and result combined, and it was utterly insane to renew his contract for it, but it was a trophy, and one they won by beating the best team in England at the time, Manchester City.

Amorim didn't win any trophies and lost to the 17th best team in England, managed by a guy whose only three wins in his last 15 matches in all competitions with Tottenham and now Nottingham Forest came in that final and the two semifinals against Bodo/Glimt.

Kobbie Mainoo

Mainoo's teammates were "perplexed" by his omission by Amorim, Gary Lineker was "really worried" about his "dismissal" and "baffled" by his absence as a starter, and so was Owen Hargreaves, who rightly said he was "United's best player by far" after coming off the bench in the September defeat to Manchester City at the Etihad.

Amorim felt he was "helping" Mainoo, but it's hard to understand how, and the academy graduate must have been equally confused about why he hasn't played in such an underperforming team. How bad do they have to be to give him a fair chance?

Amorim told him it was him or Bruno Fernandes, but we refuse to accept that Mainoo, whether inadequate or not, wouldn't do a better job alongside the captain of Manchester United than the competition winner, Manuel Ugarte, and it's not like Fernandes himself has been in unbeatable form.

United is not only terrible, but there's no place in the team for someone considered by many as the future of the club. It didn't look good.

Public Condemnation

It was supposedly an obsession with Amorim's charisma that played a significant role in Ratcliffe and INEOS choosing him as their representative, and he probably would have left the job earlier if it weren't for that charm. This makes him a very difficult man to dislike, and there's no doubt about his ability to keep the public's interest.

But, if anything, he's honest to the extreme, and we can't imagine that Ratcliffe and the INEOS bosses were too enamored with him to tarnish the great name of Manchester United.

Announcing that this is “the worst team in Manchester United's history” can't be good for the stock price.

Central Defense Substitutes

"How are you supposed to adapt to a situation when you're constantly changing it?" asked a genuinely irritated Micah Richards on Match of the Day, accompanied by a graphic showing the scattered changes Amorim made in an attempt to salvage a point against Brentford, which ended with Mason Mount as left-back in one of the most ridiculous examples of his stubborn 3-4-3.

We could almost allow him a bit of chaos in the substitutions to turn the game around, but what we can't understand is his insistence on changing at least one of his central defenders in every match.

Premier League Prize Money

Some reports suggest that sacking Amorim will cost the club £12 million. For the 2024/25 season, the difference in prizes was about £2.7 million per position, meaning any new manager would have to improve five positions over what Amorim could achieve this season for his dismissal to make economic sense. Yer da could do it.

Rasmus Hojlund

It's truly amazing how refreshing it is not to be at Manchester United. After scoring on his debut with Napoli, Hojlund now has 12 goal contributions in 21 matches.

He has proven to be a top striker this season, with the Napoli loanee scoring the goals many Manchester United fans expected from him when Amorim arrived at the club. His profile is not very different from Viktor Gyokeres, who scored goals for fun with Amorim in Portugal.

Instead, what they got was a clearly talented forward brought to Manchester United, ruined by a manager who, as Benjamin Sesko now shows, doesn't know how to get the ball to them.

“Outclassed at School” by a Rookie

In his eighth match as a football manager, Keith Andrews outclassed Amorim at school. His tactics weren't revolutionary; they didn't need to be.

Brentford recycled passes between their defenders, occasionally bringing the ball into midfield to draw United out. When United's midfielders came out to press, Jordan Henderson or someone else would pass a long ball to Igor Thiago, who then had the simple task of intimidating one, two, or all three central defenders to win free kicks, create chances, and score goals without the Red Devils' midfield appearing anywhere.

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

Oliver Glasner… or (Almost) Anyone Else

Glasner is currently the favorite to replace Amorim and would apparently accept the job without a second thought. What nonsense!

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

Gareth Southgate is also one of the favorites and we can see why he's Sir Jim Ratcliffe's choice, but as Jamie Carragher said, "the problem for Ruben Amorim is that any other Premier League manager would look at it and say: 'I could do a better job than that'."

Manchester United DNA

We hadn't heard this nonsense in a while, right? And we wonder if it's because the football Amorim made United play was so far removed from the legendary DNA of Manchester United that the football club's genetics are no longer even considered part of the rhetoric of "what's wrong with United."

Is someone back at the wheel ?

Grimsby Town

"Something has to change and you can't change 22 players," said Amorim after the historic defeat to League Two's Grimsby, in another hint of a possible resignation, after stating that "the players spoke very loudly" with their performance.

But the players could argue, as we and many other publications and experts did, that the fact that Amorim was swaying back and forth on the bench while his team lost the penalty shootout was a pretty deafening statement of a more general defeat.

The Other Nadir

There's always a rock beneath the one at the bottom. And while there's undoubtedly some recency bias, as the latest defeat is often declared as a new nadir to sell a dismissal story or simply because it's fun to write and read about the "worst Manchester United team in history" from last week, which is somehow better than this week's, there may also be a cumulative effect that automatically makes the most recent defeat the new nadir due to the prolonged period of crap.

Anyway, there were many. 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 in presenting us with images of his slow death and that of Manchester United. Besides photos smiling at press conferences or while entering the stadium before the latest crushing blow, there are three stock photos of Amorim available to select: Amorim shouting and gesturing; Amorim crouching, head in hands; Amorim looking down, lost in thought.

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'll always side with the body language experts recruited to give their strong opinions.

"You can see him crouching in a fetal position, almost like a baby," said the Mirror's BLE expert. "Imagine if someone was about to be hit, that would be the first stance they'd take. They'd drop to the ground and get into a fetal position."

Marcus Rashford

One wonders 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 had bet on the wrong horse.

Rashford would probably still be a Manchester United player if it weren't for Amorim, and he's currently performing at a higher level than any of the forwards currently part of the Red Devils' squad, as he did at Aston Villa last season.

After all those artificial media nonsense about Barcelona sending him back to Old Trafford after a couple of matches, he has now established himself as a starter in one of Europe's best teams, contributing an impressive total of eleven goals and seven assists.

Counting Mistakes

"I think he still has a job because I think those in charge of Manchester United have made so many mistakes so far and made so many decisions on and off the field that they almost don't want to admit right now that they've made another one," said Jamie Carragher on Monday Night Football.

It sounds good, but we tell Ratcliffe and those in power at Manchester United that by not admitting the mistake of hiring Amorim, they made another by not firing him for so long.

Although there have been many mistakes…

Lost the Dressing Room

In September it was reported that Amorim was "losing the dressing room's confidence" as players "questioned his refusal to pivot mid-game, with his tactics struggling against the relentless pace of the Premier League," and we're not convinced that a victory inspired by Enzo Maresca and Robert Sánchez over Chelsea would have compensated for a Brentford defeat (and the subsequent drops) in the dressing room's confidence since then.

Embarrassment

For Amorim, Ratcliffe, the players, the fans, the Manchester United expert clique, it's truly embarrassing how poorly they've played football over the last 14 months. And yes, it's also quite embarrassing to spend £200 million on new players for a manager only to sack him a couple of months later, but what's the alternative? Continue with this crap until January or the summer and spend another fortune on the next batch of unfortunate souls doomed to fail at Old Trafford?

We understand that Amorim wasn't the only one to blame —there are at least five others to blame— but there really was no one else to blame for this disaster. He has been...

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇪🇸 here.

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