We were told Ruben Amorim was an innovator, a free thinker, a maverick of the game. We didn’t think that would extend to how he deals with the media.
From the outset Amorim’s eloquence drew favourable comparisons with Jose Mourinho who, two decades earlier, arrived with a bang, more or less inventing the art of the press conference.
But over the last few weeks something far more radical has happened. Amorim has created his own genre, has invented a whole new form of mind games: the deliberate provocation of a bad headline; the self-own.
Maybe we are in the presence of genius, of a genius so far ahead that not a single pundit can work out the logic behind throwing your team under the bus.
Or maybe not.
Telling the media his players were in a relegation battle was borderline offensive, as well as plainly untrue. It’s hard to see how the dressing room could have responded well to that assertion, or indeed why those comments would endear Amorim to supporters desperate for a more hopeful vision of the future.
But it turns out that was just the warmup.
“We are being the worst team, maybe, in the history of Manchester United,” he said after the 3-1 defeat to Brighton.
What made this particularly strange was the pre-meditated feel. He announced it with a playful smile, looking out at his audience and acknowledging that “you want headlines”.
“So, here you go, your headlines.”
It was a targeted and strategic play - just one that nobody has ever seen before, and one that bizarrely invites the players to ponder whether they really are as terrible as the side that was relegated in the 1970s or the 1930s.
If only that was the worst of it. But buried beneath Amorim’s main statement was something just as significant.
“So we are getting a new coach that is losing more than the last coach, I have full knowledge of that. Like I said, I’m not going to change, no matter what.”
That’s a pretty alarming assertion given what happened at Brighton, which is of course the same thing that has happened in virtually every game under Amorim, namely the 3-4-3 looking entirely ill-suited to the players at his disposal.
Combine this with Amorim’s public flagellation of his players, and what you get – rather than the natural state of things: a club quietly working through a write-off season with natural goodwill from a sympathetic pundit class – is a team stubbornly repeating its flaws under a manager happy to throw a spotlight onto them.
And so a free-hit season has turned into one with no more free passes for Amorim. Attention simply has to turn on the manager’s performance and on his Ange Postecoglou-like insistence that the United players must bend entirely to his way of thinking.
It is admittedly fashionable - but self-evidently a bad idea. Managers must be flexible, must yield to the harsh realities in front of them. Anyone who does not will be swallowed up.
Amorim is hastening his own demise, then, unnecessarily speeding up the process by doubling down on a tactical plan that just isn’t working while effectively goading the press into declaring his Man Utd the worst iteration of all time.
It cannot hold. We are in a process, that’s for sure, but not the one Amorim expected to be in, and from here there is only one route out: adaptation, flexibility, humility.
Remaining on this course will lead to disaster, to a record-low finish and a scorched-earth ending to the campaign. The Amorim era will not recover from an opening six months like that.
But he has promised never to change. Even at this early stage in the project that means only one thing: solemnly going down with the ship.
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