The great trick of the Ruben Amorim project – until self-sabotaging press conferences blew it all up, anyway – was convincing everybody that suffering was inevitable; that every Manchester United performance must be viewed for its potential, not its product.
Amorim’s Man Utd was a work in progress, a process towards something always just out of reach, insulating him against the fury that Erik ten Hag met for producing results significantly and consistently better than what Old Trafford has seen over the last 14 months.
Manchester United’s 16th-place finish in 2024/25 stands as the single worst performance by a club in Premier League history.
Amorim was responsible for 27 matches and 27 points of that, a feat achieved through an astonishing degree of stubbornness and arrogance, headlined by the insistence on a back three that never once looked convincing, but underscored, too, by bizarre team selections and the ostracising of academy players Marcus Rashford, Alejandro Garnacho, Scott McTominay, and Kobbie Mainoo.
The figures are stark.
Amorim leaves Man Utd with a points-per-game average (1.54) significantly lower than any other manager in the club’s Premier League history and a worse win ratio (31.9%) than all bar Ralf Rangnick.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story, or at least not the most interesting part of it, which is that Amorim dragged expectations so low pundits had begun to wax lyrical about 20-minute bursts of attacking football; had begun to live in some vague hinterland, accepting with grim resignation that the world’s fourth-richest club might be just a year away from top-four ready.
How we got here is anyone’s guess, but his dismissal has surely broken the spell.
At the end of the 2023/24 campaign Ten Hag was roundly criticised for a 60-point season, so much so that most thought he ought to be sacked despite winning the FA Cup.
Amorim’s “much-improved” Man Utd are on course to win 59 points in 2025/26.
🚨 Rúben Amorim: “I came here to be the manager of Man United, NOT the coach”.@BeanymanSports 🎥 pic.twitter.com/tcU3ct6RTB
— Fabrizio Romano (@FabrizioRomano) January 4, 2026
Ultimately Amorim’s departure came suddenly, unravelling after some extraordinary press conferences culminating in what looked like the most blatant attempt (of many) to goad the board into pulling the trigger.
Yet despite the speed of his demise it is remarkable that Amorim was given this much time at all; that he could oversee unprecedented failure and then be judged not on historic standards but his own recent under-achievement.
It’s easy to improve year-on-year if you set your own bar with drastic failure in year one, yet that is what was allowed to happen, which helps explain why Amorim’s dismissal today feels so shocking when it ought to feel inevitable.
It was only a few games into Amorim’s tenure that the head coach promised a “storm is coming”, the first instance of subtly lowering expectations, of framing the job as impossible and himself as embattled before it had even begun.
It was only a month or so later he suggested his team was “maybe the worst” in Man Utd history, an extraordinary statement from which he could never have recovered.
He was not wrong, nor was he entirely to blame for the way the storm swept through Old Trafford and remained, hammering and howling, right up until his final hours in the job.
But no matter what, Amorim will always be remembered as the man who refused to change, who confused stubbornness with strength and ideology with a formation, and who left Man Utd at an historic low.
The Amorim era is now trapped in amber, frozen at its ugly nadir, which finally forces us to look at United for what they are in the here and now. Amorim won less than one in three matches in charge of Manchester United.
That is the final record. Everything else was spin.
At the time of Amorim’s arrival most agreed that if such an ambitious young tactician, so charismatic and honest, could not turn Man Utd around then nobody could. In the end he couldn’t even match Ten Hag.
For him the storm did not subside. Perhaps it never will.
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