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EPL Man Utd Sack Amorim Ruben Amorim cut a dejected figure too often at Manchester United James Gill - Danehouse/Getty Images The Athletic has live coverage of Ruben Amorim’s sacking by Manchester United.   In November 2024, Ruben Amorim was hired to be Manchester United’s first head coach of the modern era. In nearly 150 years, only one man had previously had the title of head coach — Wilf Mc Guinness, who succeeded Sir Matt Busby in 1969, with infamously underwhelming results. Advertisement The difference in title seemed a small one, but it was intended to represent a shift in club operations. The managerial role at Manchester United is too big for any one person to take on, so rather than continue the search for another great on par with Sir Alex Ferguson and Busby, Amorim would work within a new, modern footballing structure. He would be the head coach, focusing on training and tactical methods, while Jason Wilcox (director of football), Omar Berrada (chief executive officer) and others would handle recruitment and business concerns. INEOS was here. Adults had entered the room, and the chaos was meant to be over. Dan Ashworth came and went as sporting director, but decision-makers at INEOS, United’s minority owner, played it off as a well-intentioned, but quickly corrected, misstep. Multiple steady hands were on the tiller, and fans hoped for smoother sailing through choppy waters — except modern-day Manchester United appears to be without a tiller, and Amorim even referred to himself as a manager in his first press conference. “I am the manager, the head coach and I have to choose the players, ” Amorim said when asked if he would have final sign-off on incoming players. It was a small line that might have been explained by Amorim working in a second language, or as the words of someone keen to stamp their authority on a strange football environment. That theory is less plausible when placed in the context of Amorim’s outburst after the 1-1 draw with Leeds on Sunday, when the 40-year-old insisted he was the manager despite all the evidence to the contrary. It is that outburst that seems to have been the final straw for his paymasters. They sacked him on Monday, meaning United are now looking for their third permanent manager — or head coach — in just over 14 months. Advertisement Amorim wanted to be the person to usher in a new era at Manchester United. INEOS made it very clear it wanted him to be the man to do so. Perhaps the intention was for Amorim to match the development of Mikel Arteta, who was first installed as Arsenal’s head coach in December 2019, before his early successes led to his formal promotion to first-team manager in September 2020. Whatever plan senior executives had for Amorim, it was heavily dented early in his tenure. The early success necessary to develop buy-in on a football project never arrived. Whether he was to be a head coach or a manager, Amorim proved unsuited to the uniquely pressurised situation he was thrust into. He was in charge for two-thirds of a 2024-25 campaign that quickly saw United fall down the Premier League table. The Europa League offered some respite, but a season billed as “Bilbao or Bust” ended in a damp squib in the final, held in the Basque city, against Tottenham Hotspur. The supposed assets that saw Amorim become one of Portugal’s most lauded coaches curdled into hindrances. Initially received as a confident and charismatic speaker, his tendency to speak from the heart meant he frequently added fuel to an already heated football environment. He called his team one of the worst in United history. He would admit he was “not doing good enough” as a manager. His attempts to repeatedly explain Kobbie Mainoo’s limited game time inadvertently saw him accused of not trusting United’s once-heralded academy. Amorim’s consistency, also once seen as a virtue, ultimately made him seem inflexible. His adherence to an uncommon 3-4-3 frustrated sections of the fanbase and also seemed to cause tensions with parts of the United hierarchy. His players seemed unsure of their roles across multiple phases of the game. Individual mistakes crept into a squad that was already low on confidence from the end of Erik ten Hag’s managerial reign. Still, Amorim persisted with his Plan A, believing the short-term “suffering” (as he put it to reporters in September) would eventually yield long-term success. Advertisement Instead, ‘the case for Amorim’ was built on mitigating circumstances. United finished last season in 15th, but it was widely accepted that he had inherited a poorly constructed squad. The intention was for the club to improve following a summer pre-season, during which he could reshape the playing squad and reboot the football culture. Without European football, United would have a less congested fixture calendar, allowing Amorim to drill his players in whatever tactical methods he wanted at a revamped Carrington training ground. Early signs were promising. The arrivals of Matheus Cunha, Bryan Mbeumo and Benjamin Sesko in a busy summer transfer window were indicators that United still held an allure, despite the lack of European football. The INEOS-led recruitment team hoped to blend Premier League-proven talents with potential stars sourced from the continent. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who has greenlit the redundancies of hundreds of members of staff at the club since his company, INEOS, became co-owner, described Amorim on the Times’ business podcast as a “good guy” who could need three years to demonstrate he was a good coach.

Yet Amorim — and United as a whole — muddled through the 2025-26 season with many of the same issues that hobbled the previous campaign. Things were better than the chaos and calamity of the previous campaign, yet the team struggled to convince its wide and disparate fanbase that the “good times” Amorim spoke about at the end of last season were around the corner. Were United committed to Amorim because they truly believed he would come good? Or were they continuing because it would be too awkward to admit they had picked the wrong man? Things were made more complicated by Amorim’s refusal to learn from his own mistakes. Many fans asked if he would move away from his preferred methods and into a less bespoke tactical system, but he refused to yield, saying in September that not even the Pope could make him change course. When he eventually yielded and experimented with a back four in December 2025, his explanation made for a strange reading. “I cannot change because the players will understand that I’m changing because of you, ” he told reporters before the 1-1 draw at home against rock-bottom Wolverhampton Wanderers in December. It was a bad look: a football coach in charge of the most written about club in the world admitting he had persisted with a plan that had been out-thought by multiple opponents for months, simply because he did not want his players to see him as an easy touch. Advertisement There is some logic in having to put your hand in the fire before one learns that it can cause harm. Amorim was so confident in his own methods that he wished to hold his hands in the flames in the hope he might become fireproof. It was not to be. He departs United as one of their least successful head coaches, one who arrived with grand ambitions but leaves having shown himself to be more compelling in theory than reality. His team fielded multiple defensive players in games, but rarely defended well. This version of United looked to play with pace and precision, but were slow to react in the game’s critical moments. Amorim’s bravery in press conferences was rarely matched by his tactical setup in important matches.

His time in charge can be seen as a Matryoshka doll of questionable decisions. Which senior executive believed Amorim to be the correct fit at United, even after Liverpool and West Ham United reportedly had doubts over how he would adjust to the Premier League? Who thought it best to persist with Amorim even after the failure in the Europa League final? What sort of football club is INEOS attempting to build with United? Football executives like to describe moments of failure as single, discrete events, but United’s issues manifest in aggregate. Amorim was United’s first head coach, but fell foul of many of the problems that affected every manager of the post-Ferguson era. His superiors have repeated the same errors that Ratcliffe described in March, in an interview with Gary Neville on Sky Sports, when discussing the departure of Ten Hag. “Was the erratic performance a function of Erik, or was it a function of the organisation? ” he said. “And we couldn’t really get to the bottom of answering that question with certainty, I suppose, so we gave Erik the benefit of the doubt. ” The organisation that exists at United is a troubled one. In September 2024, Ashworth and Berrada invited members of the press to explain their long-term intentions for the club. “When you look at the teams who have been successful consistently for many years, it’s because they have the right coach, they have signed the right players, they have the right structure around the coach and the players, ” Berrada said. “You need to take good decisions consistently for many years to get into a position where you are a financially sustainable club that is competing to win every single competition. ” United under Amorim struggled to make good decisions consistently. Whatever happens next needs to come with clarity, conviction and — most importantly — a sense of accountability. Carl Anka is a journalist covering Manchester United for The Athletic. Follow Carl on Twitter @Ankaman616