Amorim’s system evangelism runs into the arch pragmatist

Liverpool’s manager has resisted any temptation to rebuild in his own image while his United counterpart has made things worse by seeking to impose a template

Amorim came to United advertising in advance the exact tactical shape his teams would play

4 Jan 2025 - THE GUARDIAN / Sport

Barney Ronay

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Ruben Amorim’s time at Manchester United is the physical effect of the job, the altered optics. Amorim turned up at Old Trafford looking like a handsome pirate: the jawline, the seigneurial smile, the elite Euro-cardigan styling, the sense that here is someone who smells at all times of high-spec automobile upholstery.

Seven weeks in he has the air of a doomed royal hostage, shuttled joylessly from corridor to touchline by unseen handlers. The smile has fractured, the shoulders have drooped. Most recently United’s head coach has developed a habit of dropping down on to his haunches mid-match and staring deep into the Old Trafford turf, as though searching for a) a contact lens; and b) the remaining fragments of his own shredded and tender soul.

Welcome to the meat grinder. Amorim has gone almost overnight from notions of perfectibility, systems, control, six-month unbeaten runs, to looking like a catalogue knitwear model having an existential crisis, bowed under the weight of all that scar tissue, the ghosts in the eaves, the voices through the wall.

And so, on to Anfield then. The real problem for Manchester United before tomorrow’s trip to face the league leaders isn’t the run of four straight defeats with no goals scored in the past three. It isn’t the fact their recent results against these opponents include 3-0, 7-0, 4-0 and 5-0 defeats. It isn’t the prospect of pretty much every part of this ghost ship beginning to rattle and squeak on its hinges, from tearful new additions to faded celebrity time-servers.

It is more the growing sense of some basic disjunction between Amorim’s rigid tactical requirements and the capacity to service this at a club that is simultaneously over- and understaffed, heritage rich and cash poor, ceremonially grand but also chaotic and childish.

In this context Liverpool and Arne Slot are a perfect point of contrast. The systems-obsessive versus the pragmatist: it a key dichotomy in modern coaching. On the one hand the unflinching philosophy-merchant, the just-theway-we-play evangelist.

This has become the norm and a necessary form of managerial self-promotion. Vincent Kompany took Burnley down playing a delightfully brittle style and was rewarded with one of the top jobs in world football. Ange Postecoglou continues to mask the failings of his team behind a kind of hammy ideological defiance, as though there is simply too much at stake here, bro, too much art, too much love, to waste any time learning to defend or adapt or find any other gears.

Amorim is a version of this. Here is a manager who came to United advertising weeks in advance the exact tactical shape his teams would play, as though in three at the back plus energetic midfield pressing he has uncovered some kind of incontrovertible truth.

By contrast the key to Slot’s success so far is an absence of ego, the ability to resist tearing it all down and rebuilding in your own image. Instead Slot has been confident enough to absorb Jürgen Klopp’s legacy, to adapt, tweak and refine. Clearly this is a lot easier to do when your inheritance is a fully functional eight-year model, rather than a Frankenstein’s monster of offcuts and failed eras. But this simple pragmatism has become a kind of super-strength in the age of systems maniacs.

Amorim was always going to impose his advertised template, a shape and set of patterns every opponent in the world’s toughest league has been able to prepare for, even when he clearly doesn’t have the players to make it work. No doubt there will be genuine improvement in time. He is clearly an excellent manager. But to date he has achieved the genuinely startling feat of making this United team worse in almost every area, a rare case of anti-bounce.

There are two aspects to this. With hindsight, and with full knowledge of United’s lack of transfer capacity, Amorim has gone from looking like an entirely sensible hire to a strangely jangly and ill-fitting part. Right man, wrong basket case.

He has also been criticised for some ill-fitting selections, but given the openness from the start about his tactical intentions this feels pointless, like criticising a squirrel for liking nuts. Instead it has been Amorim’s function to illustrate in precise peeled-eyeball detail the pre-existing flaws of his employers, most notably during the current year of living stupidly under the guidance of Ineos.

It seems doubly absurd now that Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s first round of interviews featured some talk about sitting down with a committee to decide on the exact style Manchester United would now play – a ludicrous suggestion even without the implication a 70-something chemicals billionaire should be involved in this process, but doubly so now in the context of hiring one of Europe’s most uncompromising systems coaches. Oh yes Sir Jim. Tell me again about “front-foot football”.

In the same manifesto speech Ratcliffe promised that Champions League football would be a nonnegotiable requirement, then retained a manager who failed to deliver it. United then spent the entire £100m transfer budget in Erik ten Hag’s doomed final window. Chuck in hiring and then firing a “best in class” director of football. Garnish with a politburo of frowning dudes, there to teach élite football all about high-performance culture.

At the end of which, little wonder the options on the pitch are sometimes incoherent. There has been a sense in Amorim’s recent midfield selections of a man sitting in a dying car pressing every pedal and flipping every switch in the desperate hope that something works. The past five games have brought four combinations in that key Amorim position, the last of which was the bizarre spectacle of Casemiro and Christian Eriksen against Newcastle, with Harry Maguire and Matthijs de Ligt behind, four men playing football through a giant patch of glue.

Nobody here is suited to Amorim’s high-intensity midfield planning. And yet we will still attempt to play with a high-intensity midfield, because this is the way we do it here. In this sense Amorim’s struggles also help to explain Slot’s early successes.

Klopp has been slightly airbrushed out of Liverpool’s current season, as though what has happened here is a kind of rescue job. In reality Klopp left a strong squad and powerful team culture that Slot has improved and expanded on, bringing new levels out of Ryan Gravenberch, Luis Díaz and even Trent Alexander-Arnold in a team that are allowed to rest on the ball now, to leave their defenders less relentlessly exposed.

Beyond this, tomorrow at Anfield represents a contrast between two models of US ownership: financially careful, data-driven but undeniably competent on the one hand; and the hugely successful parasitism of the Glazer family and their chosen cost-cutting partners.

There will of course be greater tests for Slot when this initial version hits bumps in the road or loses key personnel and the club is required to rebuild. For now tomorrow presents a salutary contrast between smart, adaptive coaching, and the oddity of hiring a systems evangelist and asking him to fill those holes with ill-fitting parts. Amorim may make this work in time. For now it feels like a case of a man with a plan, in the place where plans go to die.

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Maguire deal extended as United ‘lack leaders’

4 Jan 2025 - Sport

Jamie Jackson

Ruben Amorim has said Harry Maguire’s one-year option will be triggered “happily” but has warned the former captain to improve his leadership and form to help Manchester United turn around their poor results.

The head coach also said that the club were close to agreeing new terms with Amad Diallo, one of United’s best players this season.

Maguire, who joined from Leicester in 2019 for £80m, is suited to Amorim’s back-three formation. The triggering of the extra year on the 31-year-old’s contract, taking it to June 2026, is a turnaround in his fortunes after he was stripped of the captaincy by Erik ten Hag in summer 2023 and almost joined West Ham.

Amorim said: “Harry Maguire, [we are] going to trigger our option. I spoke with him this morning and I told him that he has to improve his game on the pitch. We need him a lot and also he has to improve as a leader, because we all know the situation that he had here.”

Maguire took the armband during Monday’s 2-0 defeat by Newcastle at Old Trafford when Lisandro Martínez, deputising as captain for the suspended Bruno Fernandes, was substituted on 65 minutes. Amorim highlighted a desperate need for onfield leaders as he praised Maguire for bouncing back from difficult times.

“He coped very well with his struggles,” he said. “There are moments in the career of a player that are different. And when you look at our team, we are starving for leaders on the pitch. He is a leader, he has to improve that part, he has to improve his game.”

Amorim indicated he was unhappy with the leadership shown by other senior players. United are 14th in the Premier League and have lost their past four matches. “If you want to be a top, top team you have to be leaders and we have that in the dressing room,” he said. “But they have to step up. Because we have a lot of young kids also and this moment is hard.”

Marcus Rashford is expected to miss tomorrow’s trip to the leaders, Liverpool. “At the moment, he’s ill, he’s not training,” said Amorim. Rashford was left out of four match-day squads for “training reasons” before being reinstated by Amorim for the Newcastle game. He was an unused substitute and the head coach was asked whether there was any change in the status of the 27-year-old.

Amorim said: “We’ll see in the future but he’s like a normal player; I make a selection, so it’s the same.”

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Slot trusts fans not to turn on Alexander-Arnold after Real bid

Arne Slot believes Real Madrid’s pursuit of Trent Alexander-Arnold will not diminish the Liverpool crowd’s support for the homegrown defender, or prove a distraction, against Manchester United tomorrow.

Real formalised their interest in Alexander-Arnold this week when making an approach to sign the 26-year-old in the January window. Liverpool rejected the enquiry and made it clear they have no interest in selling the right-back this month, despite the prospect of losing him on a free transfer when his contract expires at the end of the season. Real’s first official move plus the impasse over a new Liverpool contract increases doubt over Alexander-Arnold’s Anfield future. But Slot is confident the bond between Liverpool fans and the player will not be undermined.

“Our fans have always been so supportive and have been supporting their team and their players for so many years,” said the Liverpool head coach. “I fully trust that they will react in the right manner because we’ve been constantly together in the half-year I have been here. And I think that is something that stands out here that, for so many years, the team and the fans have been together. That has created so many special games and so many special things for this club that they don’t need me to tell them how they should react.”

Slot would not give a categorical assurance that Alexander-Arnold will remain at Liverpool beyond this transfer window. His noncommittal, however, stems from an intention to leave all contract talks to Liverpool’s sporting director, Richard Hughes, and to focus his energies on beating Ruben Amorim’s struggling team. Liverpool’s determination to keep Alexander-Arnold has not changed.

Asked if he was convinced the England international would still be a Liverpool player on 1 February, Slot replied: “I am convinced that he is playing for us on Sunday and I think it is so difficult in football to talk about what happens in a month or in six months ... there is hardly any long term in football.”