Amorim sack inevitable but he has proved that replacing him at Man Utd might be impossible to fail
It would be stupid of Unai Emery, Oliver Glasner or really anyone to inherit this mess at Man Utd. But Ruben Amorim has also made it even more appealing.
Sorry for the molten hot take – you may wish to sit down for this, SPOILER ALERT etc. – but it does rather look like Manchester United might have to change their manager again some time quite soon.
We absolutely count ourselves among the mugs who thought Ruben Amorim would be different. That this was a manager who arrived in Manchester with the requisite skills and charisma to actually have a chance.
He charmed us early on, albeit that was mainly by behaving with impressive dignity when Ed Sheeran was being a prick on Sky and every single member of Sky’s starry-eyed pundit panel simperingly indulged it after a 1-1 draw at Portman Road. A result which, in hindsight, might actually have been the more significant event of the day.
But he’s f**ked now, his insistence on sticking with his beloved 3-4-3 in the face of a squad wholly unsuited to its requirements having long since tipped over from stoic and principled into mulish stubborn stupidity.
His attempts at goading Manchester United into sacking him are now free from any and all couching, with his response to another humbling result in which his system and the players attempting to play within it were ruthlessly exposed yet again being “I’m not changing, if you want literally anything other than more of this unwatchable and dreadful sh*t then sack me, yeah?” (We’re paraphrasing, but this was the gist.)
Where were we? Oh yeah. Amorim. Back at the start. When we thought he was going to be good at this and, perhaps even more importantly, he thought he was going to be good at this.
Point being, we get it. We get the lure and the pull of Manchester United. In hindsight, Amorim was a damn fool who has set his career back catastrophically by doing what he knew at the time to be a sub-optimal choice of jumping to United mid-season when he had a really, really good thing going on at Sporting.
But you really do always have to remember this was and is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About. It’s easy to forget now he’s been reduced to a meme for p*ssing about with his little magnet toys while his team were 2-0 down at League Two Grimsby, but back when United appointed him there was perhaps no more highly-rated and better regarded young coach in the game. Xabi Alonso, maybe, but that’s about it.
Amorim was doing wonders at Sporting and whatever path he chose next seemed absolutely certain to involve one of the biggest clubs in the world. It was almost impossible to conceive a scenario where he wouldn’t be making that step up to the truly elite level with his next move.
And yet even he, when the chance to take over at Manchester United came along at entirely the wrong time didn’t think he could risk turning that opportunity down in case it never came around again.
So you really do have to consider that, when wondering whether managers of less overtly ridiculous Premier League clubs would accept the poisoned Old Trafford chalice if offered it. Because in almost all cases, we really think they would.
The current top 10 favourites with the bookies to be next United manager contains four current Premier League managers. All of them have done and are doing excellent jobs at their current clubs, and all of those clubs are less screwed up than United are.
But still we think any one of Oliver Glasner, or Unai Emery, or Marco Silva, or Andoni Iraola would take this stupid opportunity if it were offered them.
TIMUFCWTA is such a powerful thing, still. To be absolutely clear, we’re not saying any or all of those managers should leave their current jobs for United. With the possible exception of Emery, who may well be sensing the way the Villa Park winds are blowing and consider now to be a good time to get out with his reputation still sky high, it would almost certainly be foolish.
But we still think they’d do it, and can still see why they would do it even if they shouldn’t. Being the manager who sorts Manchester United out is a beguiling thought, and even the most publicly self-effacing manager wouldn’t have got to the level of ‘Successful Premier League Gaffer’ without a large enough slice of ego to truly believe they could be the manager to do just that.
Will it work for them? No, it never does. These people delude themselves into thinking it might but… but it might work for Glasner/Emery/Silva/Iraola.
Hear us out. Are Manchester United a sensible and stable football club for a manager to be getting involved in right now? No, obviously not. Logically you should run for the hills at the first whispers in the press suggesting you’re in the running.
But you have to accept and acknowledge the temptation. We’ve already seen it this summer with players. The power of TIMUFCWTA led Bryan Mbeumo to ignore glances from actual Champions League clubs – one of them now managed by the man under which he reached the elite levels necessary to attract their interest – because he only wanted United.
He’s not an outlier. And nor would any of those managers be who think they could do what Amorim couldn’t, what Ten Hag couldn’t, what Mourinho, Solskjaer, Van Gaal and Moyes couldn’t.
And a big part of the reason why that is somehow a less mad thing to believe of yourself is specifically because of not despite just how bad Amorim has been.
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There’s a very real danger – in life in general as well as football specifically – in believing rock bottom has been struck, that things cannot possibly get any worse.
Fair to say we probably all thought United had reached that point under Ten Hag – at least in the league.
Amorim has exploded that notion entirely. Yet now that bar is so low that literally the only way for a new manager to fall below it would be literal, actual relegation. Amorim has so spectacularly scorched the earth that the impossible job might now in fact have become one in which it really is impossible to fail.
United is a mess of a club, without doubt, and the squad is an incoherent hotch-potch of players assembled without an apparent clear plan for how to assemble them into a team. But they shouldn’t be this bad. They shouldn’t be 31-points-from-31-games-and-no-idea-how-to-score-goals bad.
There is still heaps of talent in this squad, and some of it hasn’t been forced out by Amorim yet. There is still time.
So bad has Amorim’s system become that there are quick fixes everywhere. Just changing to a system – literally any system – where Bruno Fernandes can operate as a creative No. 10 instead of a frustrated central-midfield workhorse would surely deliver some kind of instant result.
Having a gameplan where the primary creative outlet is Bruno, or Matheus Cunha, or Mbeumo rather than Patrick Dorgu is surely going to make things a bit less bad. Or a system that doesn’t fundamentally require two mobile, technical runners in midfield when you have no mobile technical midfield runners available.
A defence that doesn’t disapparate instantly at the sight of more than two opposition attackers. This kind of thing.
None of these feel like they should be impossible puzzles to solve. The problem for United currently isn’t that Amorim can’t find solutions to these issues, it’s that he’s too pig-headed to even accept the premise that solutions can or should be sought.
It’s still plenty early enough in the season for any of those other managers to make meaningful changes even with the existing playing personnel at what would in all likelihood be the biggest club any of them would ever get to manage.
It should still be easy enough for a manager with a smidgeon of flexibility and imagination to steer this club into the top eight this season.
And even though This Is Manchester United Football Club We’re Talking About, right now that would still represent success.
