A full 20 reasons why Manchester United should sack Ruben Amorim

Will Ford 02 Oct 2025 1:55 PM

Ruben Amorim is on borrowed time at Manchester United.

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.

And still – at time of writing – Ruben Amorim’s Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About. So we’ve come up with 20.

The formation

We would be completely bored of it by now 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 maintains, almost entirely on the basis of success at one other football club, that it’s not the system that’s the problem, and he’s not for moving.

We don’t quite know why we’ve reached a point in professional football where a manager who can’t, or at least won’t, adapt is held up as some sort of misunderstood genius, but Amorim has been given a helluva lot of rope because of his stubbornness.

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 sees a move away from his principles as a respect-dwindling admission of defeat, surely the very real, actual defeats are 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’s 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 are? You said ‘overloads’, didn’t you? Get out.

34 points from 33 games

Only 11 Premier League managers have had a worse record after 33 games. Frank Lampard had the same tally at Everton.

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 asking 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 continue to suggest Amorim may walk before he’s pushed. And while that sounds very much like a £12m compensation saving, we can see Gary Neville now with his headset on explaining why someone quitting Manchester United before they quit on him is “the lowest of the low for the football club”.

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

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

He’s been 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’s 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 already be out of the job 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 are 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 can’t fathom is his insistence on changing at least one of his centre-backs in every single game.

He’s made ten unenforced centre-back substitutions this season. Win, lose or draw, it doesn’t matter. Leny Yoro came on for Maguire on Saturday, started on the left side, forcing Matthijs de Ligt into the middle, then moved to the right when Mount came on for Luke Shaw, with Diogo Dalot moving into the back three.

There’s a fair chance they didn’t know where they were supposed to be playing come the end of the game, and there’s no way the players walked off that pitch believing they’re in the hands of a measured tactician.

Premier League prize money

Reports suggest sacking Amorim will 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 scored two goals in the Serie A side’s 2-1 win over Sporting in the Champions League on Wednesday.

The first saw him burst through two defenders and latch on to a through ball from Kevin De Bruyne before sliding the ball between the goalkeeper’s legs; the second saw him put his head where it hurts to beat the ‘keeper to a De Bruyne cross.

If you wanted a brace to showcase a Proper Striker it was just about perfect and the first goal in particular is the sort of run and finish many Manchester United fans will have been expecting from Hojlund 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 is making life “easy” for Andrews and every other manager he comes up against as they know exactly how United are 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 second 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 has United playing is now so far removed from the fabled Manchester United DNA that the genetics of the football club is 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 his 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. It looked like the point of no return, and still does.

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 have been plenty. Grimsby, Brentford, a 2-0 home defeat to Graham Potter’s West Ham, Brentford again, Wolves on Boxing Day.

BLE analysis

Amorim is 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 Amorim wasn’t the manager, 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, assisting a goal in each of his last four La Liga games and against PSG in the Champions League on Wednesday.

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’re currently making another in not sacking him.

There have been a helluva lot of mistakes though… Ruben Amorim is the worst of 19 Sir Jim Ratcliffe mistakes at Manchester United

Lost the dressing room

It was reported last month 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 will have outweighed a Brentford defeat 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 are. 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 and spend another wedge of cash on the next raft of ill-advised souls doomed to fail at Old Trafford?

We understand that Amorim isn’t solely to blame – there are at least five other culprits – but there really is currently no-one more to blame for this mess. He has been, and will continue to be, a “disaster”.

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