Amorim’s reign has been brutally ended by Man United after a disastrous spell that included a loss to Grimsby and being held by a Wolves side with just two points at the time
“I am a little bit of a dreamer,” smiled Ruben Amorim. “Call me naive, but I truly feel that I am the right man in the right moment.” That was at his unveiling as Manchester United manager, before the dream turned into a nightmare, before naivety felt the least of his mistakes. As Amorim’s reign of error ends, it is apparent that it was the wrong moment for him. But also that he was the wrong man.
Amorim had the charisma to be United manager; just not the results, with a host of new candidates already gathering. Old Trafford has been the theatre of broken dreams in the last dozen years, but if none of the men who followed Sir Alex Ferguson could truly be called a success, none failed quite like Amorim. When United hired him, they felt he was the most exciting young coach in Europe. He left Sporting CP with a 100 percent record in the Portuguese league and second in the Champions League. He left United with a 38.71 win percentage, comparable with those of Wilf McGuinness and Frank O’Farrell, and the possibility he was their worst manager since the 1930s. In his parting press conference, at Leeds on Sunday, he said that “every department needs to do their job”. Over 14 months, he did not do his remotely well enough.
For United and Amorim alike, there should be an inquest into how each got it so badly wrong. Neither, it feels safe to say, really understood the other. Much like Amorim’s increasingly infamous 3-4-3 formation, there were square pegs and round holes. But the post-mortem could begin with this moment: Amorim had initially wanted to wait, to take over in the summer of 2025. Parachuting him in mid-season proved a mistake that followed another: United’s misguided decision to give Erik ten Hag a new contract in 2024, permit him to spend some £200m on players – including Joshua Zirzkee and Manuel Ugarte, neither in Amorim’s first-choice team and neither remotely good enough – and sack him in October. Amorim, not among the host of managers United considered four months earlier, emerged as their only choice. United paid Sporting €11m in compensation as Amorim raised expectations by beating Manchester City 4-1 in the Champions League.
The positive first impression he generated upon his arrival, his quotable eloquence offering a contrast to Ten Hag’s more halting, staccato utterings, continued onto the pitch. United were ahead after 80 seconds of his managerial debut, thanks to Marcus Rashford at Ipswich; there is a temptation to say that is as good as it got, both for Amorim and Rashford. And if it is not quite true, in the manager’s case, the idea that Amorim was a silver bullet was soon disproved, not least by his own rhetoric. United drew at Ipswich, won his second and third games and Amorim promptly warned “the storm will come”. He was correct, even if few anticipated it would prove more of a hurricane than a shower.
His side lost six times in December 2024, the first calendar month which brought six United defeats since 1930. It also contained a smash-and-grab Manchester derby win, courtesy of Amad Diallo. The Ivorian appeared one of the beneficiaries of Amorim’s appointment, but there were too few others. If defeating City, fortunate as it was, formed part of a theme – Amorim’s United would draw at Anfield and knock Arsenal out of the FA Cup with 10 men the following month and were sometimes better as underdogs against the elite – the broader problem came in games they were expected to win.
Their method of victory, such as it was, seemed to involve late goals from some combination of Bruno Fernandes, Harry Maguire and Amad; it showed spirit, but not a sustainable formula. Meanwhile, United’s results against the Premier League’s mid-table teams were alarmingly poor: they played 17 league matches under Amorim against the sides who finished between fifth and 17th last season and took just 11 points. They lost at Old Trafford to Nottingham Forest, Bournemouth, Newcastle, Brighton, Crystal Palace, Wolves and West Ham, as well as going out of the FA Cup at home to Fulham.
United kept producing slogans, corporate mission statements – Project 150, Mission 21 – while getting further away from that elusive 21st league title. Amorim could be emotional and hyperbolic and was quick to warn that they could be in a relegation battle. Two months after his arrival, he declared his side were “maybe the worst” in the club’s 147-year history. If such statements rarely seemed to furnish his team with belief, there were points when they seemed self-fulfilling prophecies.
Amorim redefined what was possible for United; just not in the right way. The limped in 15th last season, their lowest finish for half a century. They took 27 points from 27 league games under Amorim. After the final day win over Aston Villa, he called it “this disaster season”. By then, the chance of redemption had gone. It may have been an illustration of United’s problems in the Premier League, where almost everyone had fine players and good managers and Amorim could come up short in comparison, that they were often better in the Europa League. It nevertheless required a ridiculous 5-4 win over Lyon to take them into the semi-finals, and a 7-1 aggregate triumph over Athletic Bilbao ensued.
But then came another Premier League team, one in its own historic low and yet one which beat United four times in a season. Amorim had erred in fielding a weakened team at Tottenham in the Carabao Cup, ending one chance of silverware (ludicrously, it was one of two games in eight days when a United goalkeeper conceded direct from a corner). Spurs proved his nemesis again in the Europa League final. United were dismal.
Securing silverware the previous summer had bought Ten Hag more time; a year later, United again stuck with a manager they should have sacked. Co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe seemed to like his head coach’s plain-speaking style. “He tells me to f*** off. I like him,” said the Ineos billionaire in March. Ratcliffe did not respond by telling Amorim to clear his desk, even as United sacked 450 members of staff; that Amorim’s results came at a cost to their bank balance hardly helped, though they invested heavily again in 2025.
The personnel changed. Some things did not. Until, remarkably, Amorim used a back four in two of his last five games, he remained devoted to his 3-4-3; the squad he inherited seemed the least suitable in the Premier League to playing it. The full-backs weren’t wing-backs. When Fernandes played in the centre of midfield, United were too open. When he did not, they had too few goalscorers. Other teams, such as Oliver Glasner’s Palace, played 3-4-3 far better. Indeed, a regular sense was that opposing managers had simply set their teams up better; some might conclude they were simply better managers. It scarcely reflected well on Amorim that, in his penultimate match in charge, he was outwitted by Rob Edwards, manager of winless Wolves.
Edwards realised Amorim would play 3-4-3; at one stage, the Portuguese said that not even the Pope could make him change his shape, though belatedly and seemingly on the suggestion of the club, he did not. In those two outings with a back four, United first scored four against Bournemouth and then defended defiantly to beat Newcastle. It added to the impression a year had been wasted with on obdurate insistence on 3-4-3.
It was hard to escape the conclusion that a limited, inflexible manager lacked faith in his ability to try anything else and boxed himself into a corner with his stubbornness. He had gone all-in from the start, looking for revolution when evolution may have been wiser. He might have made a mistake at the start by dispensing with the services of Ruud van Nistelrooy, the assistant who had been a popular caretaker. Putting his sidekick Carlos Fernandes in charge of set-pieces seemed to backfire when United kept conceding from corners.
But, to Amorim’s irritation, his 3-4-3 remained an issue. “I have to sell my idea because I don’t have another one,” he said. He concluded the players were the problem, not the system. Rashford was the first to be bombed out, going on to a restorative loan at Aston Villa and then to excel for Barcelona, without United recouping a transfer fee.
United believed Amorim would help develop young players. But the crown jewels, the three players who were not for sale in the summer of 2024, were Rasmus Hojlund, Kobbie Mainoo and Alejandro Garnacho. A year later, the Argentinian, annoyed at being benched for the Europa League final, was sold for a cut-price fee to Chelsea, the Dane, drained of confidence and starved of service to such an extent that he only scored three times in his last 35 games for Amorim, was loaned out, and has quickly fired for Napoli, and the Englishman, who had been bizarrely used as a No 10 and a false nine, but was rarely trusted in midfield, had asked to go too. That was part of the indictment of Amorim; so, too, that in the obdurate determination to use 3-4-3, players were crowbarred into the system with oddities like Mason Mount being deployed as a wing-back.
Amorim appeared to conclude the forwards he inherited were the reason United scored too few goals. Their three big buys in 2025 were all attackers, when others might have prioritised a central midfielder or a goalkeeper. It was not his fault they seemed to pay over the odds in forking out £200m for Matheus Cunha, Bryan Mbeumo and Benjamin Sesko; yet only Mbeumo proved a success, with Sesko scoring just two goals in 17 games; meanwhile, the way Amorim exiled players and compiled a bomb squad made it harder for them to sell well.
And he contrived to turn the goalkeeping problem into an early-season crisis. Andre Onana had been erratic in 2024-25; yet as United focused on forwards, he seemed set to stay, only to be omitted on the opening day of the 2025-26 season, with Amorim giving conflicting explanations, as his deputy Altay Bayindir erred to gift Arsenal victory. Onana was eventually loaned to Trabzonspor after the nadir of Amorim’s tenure, a Carabao Cup exit to Grimsby in which the League Two team were distinctly superior. United belatedly bought the untried Belgian Senne Lammens, but retained Bayindir in goal for more mistakes. Lammens belatedly proved an improvement, but only after damage had been done.
Amorim, in his address on the pitch in May, had promised the good times were coming. They weren’t. United stumbled into the new season. They beat 10-man Chelsea. Ratcliffe gave Amorim his backing again. But they never seemed a team transformed. They had targeted European qualification this season, but Grimsby closed off one path to the continent.
The league seemed to open another up. Amorim knew that, for almost a year, he had never recorded back-to-back wins in the top flight. His best result ended that statistic, another late intervention by Maguire bringing victory over Liverpool at Anfield. Yet after three consecutive wins, United had the opportunity to surge into the Champions League places. They repeatedly failed: faced with a favourable fixture list, they won only three of Amorim’s last 11 games. Even as they became more prolific, they were unable to keep clean sheets.
Despite the advantage of not playing in Europe, they started games too slowly, rarely won second halves, and lost leads. The alliance between Amorim and the hierarchy broke down. Amorim expressed his frustration at being head coach and not manager, hinting he wanted further signings, despite spending £250m in the summer. His outburst at Elland Road proved the final straw. This time, Ratcliffe, or others, did tell him to “f*** off”; or words to that effect, anyway.
He leaves United in a hole, with Ratcliffe’s first appointment gone horribly awry. Once again, he arguably should have sacked a manager in the summer, given him a fortune to spend and now needs a mid-season appointment. As for Amorim, overhyped and overpromoted, his record wretched and his tactics holding his team back, he departs with his reputation shredded. The dream turned into a nightmare.
Category: General Sports
