Ruben Amorim - Manchester United Head Coach

Sporting4Ever said:
Yes.
In more ways than one.

Amorim surprised us tremendously, pretty much since the start, in the way in which he knew exactly where Sporting were at that time, and where it should be.
I won't go long on the backstory (I can at a later time if people are interested), but basically when he joined our board was under serious pressure due to confrontations with supporters. That, added to the enormous price we paid for him (cheap, in retrospect), meant that had Amorim failed, the board would have to step down.
Sporting's identity as a one of big 3 had diluted after decades of mismanagement, incompetence and downright theft of the club's assets.

But Amorim knew that identity, and believed that Sporting should and could return to it. He also knew we were pretty far from that, we had young and inexperienced players, and they needed to grow without the stress and pressure of fighting for titles. So that 1st season the motto was "jogo a jogo". Basically, one game at a time. When Sporting started to win matches and was leading the table, journalists were constantly asking him if we were title contenders, and his answer was always "were contenders to win the next game". Not until the actual game that would mathematically gives us the title did he say that, and while it infuriated some fans and pissed the reporters that he didn't engage, his reasoning was flawless, and something he explained well. "My players are young, and while they need to learn to live with this pressure, at this point I want them focused on winning one game at a time. Because in the end that's what matters. No matter who you play against, you need to be focused on the present and the next game, not the games and titles that will come later."

A perfect example of that came again in his 2nd season, when we finally got back to the Champions League with a squad filled with rookies. Ironically, our first UCL game was against Ten Hag's Ajax, and we got handily trashed at home 1-5, with Haller scoring 4 goals. The 2nd game was better, we "only" lost 1-0 in Dortmund. But after that things improved, we beat Besiktas twice, scoring 4 goals in both games, and beat Borussia Dortmund 3-1 giving us the advantage on head-to-head goals, which allowed us to qualify for the knockout round for the 1st time in more than a decade.

There have been setbacks, but the club has streadily grown over his tenure. Hopefully what he (and others) built will remain in place and we won't go back.
And that's one of the reasons why I think he took the job, and why (if he's properly backed up by the new management) he can do the same there.
He's an amazing leader, and an amazing communicator. This might suffer a big now, since his English is good, but it's not good enough to let him communicate with the press at the same level he did in Portuguese. Hopefully he'll improve fast on that level.
I don't think there will be such a big impact in the locker room, as he's used to talking with players with different languages, and there's already players in place that can help with anything he might need, like Bruno and Ugarte.


Lastly, the replacement.
We all feel like the club has been planning this for a while, and according to them, the manager that's taking over tomorrow (today) is the same one that would take over when Ruben left in the summer.
There's only one person we can think of, João Pereira. He's been in the club for 2 years going on 3, he came at the urging of Ruben, and all things point to them having a similar mentality, a similar managing style, which will likely mean little or no changes in how the team plays.
But he is very inexperienced. He has a bit more time than Ruben had when he took over, but not by much. Hopefully everything else in place is enough so that he hits the ground running, but we're all apprehensive right now. We looked to be on track to having a dominant season, and who knows what will happen now...
We're sad and hurt he's leaving now, personally I don't see the benefit for United, except having a really long pre-season to prepare, because it's gonna take ages for his ideas, his tactics and his dynamics to be fully integrated into the squad.
United plays twice a week for pretty much all the time until the January market, so between recovery sessions and preparing for the next opponents, how many training sessions will he get to implement his ideas??

So I hope he succeeds there. Not only for his sake, but also because I want United to return to its rightful place, and also because I don't want him to be ground up like so many have in the past.
But I fear that the new management might not be aware of Amorim's potential. Their ultimatum "if you don't come now we'll move on to someone else" tells me they look at Amorim as a good manager with potential, and not THE manager. Which makes me fear that, if things are not working at a given time, they'll just move on to another one.

Anyway, I've rambled enough. :eek::lol:
Take care of him.
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That's an excellent post, thank you! Mods, please promote this poster.

It's tricky to say why he was given that ultimatum as you say. One benefit is that he'll know fully what he's working with come summer, but generally I am against midseason appointments because it can take some wind out of the new manager's sails. I would have been fine with Ruud being in situ until June with Amorim liaising with Ashworth about market opportunities over the course of the season.

There will indeed be no time to work a lot on his ideas as we will have a very clogged up schedule until January. As someone said earlier in this thread, it would have been a bit of a masterstroke to push all the players to pull a sickie for International duty and work for these two weeks with him on the training ground in a mini pre-season. That kind of thing takes a lot of planning and cunning though. I hope the hierarchy is sensible and gives him time. I'd be surprised if we're good enough to challenge until the season after next. He'll need a bit of a revamp over summer and most importantly we'll need to cease the commercial pre-seasons - at the very least for next summer - and only focus on football. Maybe a base in Portugal for 3-4 weeks with no travel for matches. If that happens it will be proof that they are actually putting football first.

I'm not sure how much you watch United, but how do you think he'll use Garnacho and Amad?

Again, thanks for your feedback mate.
 
I think the ultimatum was more a reflection of our desperation to get him now. I wonder if he'd called their bluff whether they really would've looked elsewhere.
 
Number 1 tracked flight worldwide. To put that into perspective, these are all the flights right now:

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We. Are. Massive.
 
anyone else on the flight tracker getting scared by the other planes? Like KLM147
 
Rodgerzzz said:
They're really taking him on the scenic route around Greater Manchester aren't they :lol:
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He has to see Old Trafford on the way in. ( It's also the landing direction you have to head in from the east over Stockport to land.)
 
Marcus said:
Wow! I have never seen the plane of a United signing in flight tracker before. Thanks!
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Sigh. I can remember way back to my first time!

To be honest, most recently the flight trackers have pretty underwhelming. Lets hope and pray this one is the real messiah this time.
 
Gambit said:
He has to see Old Trafford on the way in. ( It's also the landing direction you have to head in from the east over Stockport to land.)
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Oh I know, I can proudly say that many a time I've followed the same approach pattern as Ruben is right now from the luxury of a Jet2 737.
 
The beauty of football.

We hate when we lose, we get frustrated when we play badly, we want managers to get sacked and when there's a new one, there's hope and 10k people are following his flight on flightradar24.
 
They are showing the landing on portuguese TV :lol:

Decent weather
 
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