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By IAN LADYMAN, FOOTBALL EDITOR Published: 22: 37 AEDT, 5 January 2026 | Updated: 23: 15 AEDT, 5 January 2026 9 View comments The afternoon before he was hurried out of the door at Manchester United, Ruben Amorim got one final thing wrong. He was not - as he claimed - the manager of the football club. He was hired 14 months ago as a coach and ultimately hasn't proved to be good enough at it. Under the control of Sir Jim Ratcliffe and a newly assembled team of executives, United have undergone a root and branch transformation in terms of their football structure. But underneath all of that, Amorim's brief was clear. It was to improve the team. To bring some order to the tactical chaos left behind by his predecessor Erik Ten Hag. He leaves having failed in that task and piece by piece the excuses have fallen away. Amorim has been working with better players than Ten Hag had. United had a better summer window last time round. Almost as importantly, Amorim has had plenty of time to properly instill ideas this season. Not in Europe after last season's dismal 15th place Premier League finish and Europa League final defeat and out of the Carabao Cup since defeat at Grimsby in August, Amorim's United have effectively been playing one game a week for the last four and a half months. Ruben Amorim was hired as a coach but the likes of Kobbie Mainoo have drifted under him Leny Yoro, pictured during Sunday's draw against Leeds United, is also on the 'drifted' list Any coach in the country trying to drill a team, instill ideas and improve individual players would give anything for that kind of time on the training field. They would kill to have fresh players - a team not drained by European competition and travel - every time a Premier League weekend arrived. That has been Amorim's gift this season but what has he done with it? Nowhere near enough. United have enjoyed a couple of noticeable individual results - wins against Chelsea and Liverpool for example - but there has been no consistent upturn in performances or results. Nothing really tangible, nothing concrete. Somehow, United sit sixth in the league table today but a record of eight wins from 20 league games paints a more reliable picture. Only once this season have United won consecutive games. That does not point to real improvement or progress, only to uncertainty and, given the amount of money spent in the summer on attacking players, it's not good enough. As for the individual players in his charge, which of them have improved significantly or indeed at all on Amorim's watch? The Brazilian midfielder Casemiro has had something of a second Old Trafford coming while captain Bruno Fernandes has not dropped his levels. Mason Mount has enjoyed some good moments this season while new signings Senne Lammens, Bryan Mbeumo and Matheus Cunha have looked like United players of worth. Casemiro has experienced a second coming at United under the Portuguese coach Sadly, the other column on the ledger is far too crowded as players such as Benjamin Sesko, Manuel Ugarte, Kobbie Mainoo, Amad Diallo, Leny Yoro and Joshua Zirkzee have either drifted aimlessly or disappeared from view altogether. Not all of that can be laid at the door of the manager. He didn't buy all these players. Some of them just don't look good enough and probably aren't. He cannot, for example, control the actions of Mainoo's half-brother. But the fact is that Amorim was hired to build and coach a team and he hasn't done it. Teams that play well and improve and show progressive patterns will always protect a manager from the other stuff. Those that don't will lead a guy over a cliff. Amorim may say in his defence that his team are within touching distance of the Champions League places, only behind world champions Chelsea on goal difference and Premier League champions Liverpool by three points. Equally, Amorim's United lead Brentford and Sunderland by a point and a team like Fulham by three. That tells a story of its own and it was not the one he was hired to write. Off the field, life as a United manager continues to be the most demanding in the top flight. No shades of grey are allowed. A victory is greeted prematurely as a corner turned and a defeat as a sporting tragedy. To his credit, Amorim tried to push back at these extremes. He also spoke honestly and admirably about ongoing issues with club culture. Equally, no other manager in England is judged so quickly, so often and by so many. Every weekend and Monday morning - and often in between - Amorim has felt the sting of arrows fired by Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Rio Ferdinand, Paul Scholes and others. Kobbie Mainoo's brother, Jordan, wore a shirt reading 'Free Kobbie Mainoo' last month No other manager in the country has to deal with that and it's no-coincidence that Amorim referenced it in what turned out to be a verbal suicide note in the Elland Road press room on Sunday afternoon. But the Portuguese could have helped himself by refusing to give the Class of 92 and others so much ammunition. Every manager has bad spells and bad days. At Liverpool, Arne Slot knows that well. But where Slot sees credit in the bank, Amorim's backstory is one of a tactical rigidity that was always going to get him in the end. One of the most revealing lines in my colleague Nathan Salt's compelling piece on the behind the scenes tensions threatening Amorim on Saturday was that which revealed United's age group teams are not playing their first team coach's beloved 3-4-2-1 system. Amorim was revered for his methods in Portugal but - as some of us warned on the day of his appointment - standards and the questions asked in England are much more exacting and over time the 40-year-old has failed conclusively to find the answers. The gradual decline in standards at Old Trafford since the days of Sir Alex Ferguson has been such that each of the six full-time managers that have followed has been given greater and greater leeway. David Moyes, for example, was sacked after ten months with United in seventh place and having exited the Champions League after two tight quarter-final legs against Bayern Munich. Amorim, on the other hand, was excused last season's dismal effort - he only took over in November 2024 - in the hope he would provide something better this time. He has, but it's been marginal. To clarify, United didn't hire a manager on that early winter's day. They hired someone they hoped would prove to be one of Europe's most inspirational coaches. And they were wrong.

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