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Ruben Amorim. Alamy Stock Photo

Amorim is playing a losing game at United - the age of the ideologue is ending

United appointing a coach so wedded to a specific approach is proving to be a very risky strategy.

MANCHESTER UNITED PUNDIT and sometime manager Ruben Amorim delivered journalists their headlines in the aftermath of Sunday’s defeat to Brighton, telling his press conference his side “are being the worst team, maybe, in the history of Manchester United.” 

Why would Amorim go full Mark Goldbridge on his own players? If he’s trying some shock therapy on his players, he will be disappointed – and not just because Big Sir Jim Ratcliffe probably hasn’t paid the electric bill. 

This column has another theory on Ruben’s AmorimFanTV: he was scrambling for a one-liner to overshadow something he had already said.  

“We can lose, but we have to maintain positions” said Amorim prior to his headline words. If I want to show some difference to the media and to the fans, I would put [on] two strikers, but I didn’t because it would be more difficult for [the players] to understand the way we play.” 

So Amorim could have thrown on an extra striker to try and at least draw the game, but he figured that points potentially earned today would be at a greater cost to his players’ understanding of his system tomorrow. 

Two Lads Up Top would evidently have been a ruinous indulgence to Amorim’s extreme creed.

You can accuse the manager of having his priorities arseways here, but truly it’s not his fault: he is just trying to do the job he was hired to do. 

Manchester United have been so lacking in authority and direction since Alex Ferguson’s retirement that they are now desperate to believe in something; anything. Their chosen idol is Ruben Amorim’s 3-4-3, and to the heretical doubters like Dan Ashworth, Ratcliffe has promised excommunication.

A decade in the wilderness may have numbed United to all feeling, but Ratcliffe and Ineos have alighted upon a very risky strategy. 

Eleven points from 11 league games has proven there is no short-term upside to Amorim’s appointment, and that’s hardly a shock given so few players in the squad are suited to his style of play.

United are also backing themselves to sign the right players for Amorim’s system, which in itself resembles a major gamble. They have little financial headroom to actually spend at the moment, and Ineos have yet to prove they can break the Glazers’ inertia-then-panic cycle in the transfer market. 

But even if United get all of this right, they might find they are following an archaic form of religion, because this has been the Premier League season to show that the age of the ideologue manager may be passing. 

Ange Postecoglou is showing a stunning, Amorimesque lack of flexibility at Tottenham, and sooner or later it will cost him his job. Like Amorim, Postecoglou is doing the job he was hired to do, and in theory The Ange Plan makes perfect sense for Daniel Levy, a man who has never seen a corner he did not wish to cut. 

Attacking players are the most expensive types of player in the game, but Postecoglou’s breackneck gameplan is delivering the number of goals that would fire a team to the Champions League on a fraction of the price. The trade-off is a brittle defensive foundation that requires a goalkeeper to be good with his feet and pacy centre-backs who are happy to run 100m sprints every couple of minutes.

Once those players disappear, the whole edifice crumbles. In the absences of Vicario, Van de Ven, and Romero, Postecoglou has not changed, and it’s led to a run of results so wretched that sooner or later the rest of us will have to adapt his iconic phrase. It’s just who they were, mate

Arsenal are also being held back in the title race by the dead hand of Mikel Arteta, who has sought ever-greater levels of control of games with every passing season. This has led to a unprecedented reliance on set pieces and an over-reliance on defence over attack, leaving Arsenal with a stockpile of physical and technical full-backs but precious few forwards. 

Last Saturday accentuated Arsenal’s folly. They toiled to find a winner at home to Aston Villa hours after Liverpool won at Brentford thanks to goals from their fifth-choice attacker (Darwin), in which their fifth-choice midfielder (Elliot) and sixth-choice attacker (Chiesa) played a role.

Alexander Isak is the best striker in the Premier League, but reports have claimed Arteta didn’t feel he was the right fit for his Arsenal system. If the answer is Kai Havertz and not Isak, it’s time for Arteta to change the question. 

The coaches now prospering in the Premier League are those with a healthy disregard for dogma. Nuno was recently deemed a man out of time, but is now thriving by trusting the craft and improvisation of his counter-attackers.

Eddie Howe underwent a kind of radicalisation by studying Diego Simeone at Atletico Madrid, and went from the architect of a pleasing, frail Bournemouth side to the father of a Newcastle team possessed by a dark energy. 

Thomas Frank and Bournemouth frequently swap between a back three and a back four, tailoring their approach to the opponent they meet. 

Meanwhile, nobody – not even Sean Dyche’s Everton – play more long balls than Andoni Iraola’s Bournemouth, who are arguably the best pound-for-pound-adjusted-for-current-injuries team in the league. 

If the ideologues all descend from Pep Guardiola, they have been blind to his constant re-invention. If he set out to conquer Europe with a Manchester City built in the diminutive image of his Barcelona team, he finally won the Champions League with a Stoke-like line of four big centre-backs and a giant Norwegian goalador who goes on a work-to-rule anywhere outside the opposition box. 

City look to be clambering out of their early-season collapse now, and that’s partly because Kevin de Bruyne is fit again and Guardiola has the wisdom to give him a free role.

Liverpool, meanwhile, look to have struck upon some magic alchemy, and the longer the season goes on, the more difficult it is to see what Arne Slot is actually doing: there are times they play with the cool, antiseptic control he wants, and other times in which they attack and leak goals like Jurgen Klopp is still snarling on the touchline. 

firo-01-06-2024-football-football-uefa-champions-league-season-20232024-ucl-cl-final-final-bvb-borussia-dortmund-real-madrid-02-real-madrid-will-be-champions-league-winners-award-cerem Carlo Ancelotti after last season's Champions League final. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

The defining team of the 2020s has been Real Madrid, who have taken a pretty straight-forward approach: sign a bunch of the best players, and find a coach who will get out of their way. 

“I don’t believe in ideologies like Guardiolismo, Sarrismo… I believe in the identity of the team”, said Carlo Ancelotti in a recent interview. “A clever coach is one who adapts the game to the characteristics of his players.

For United, perhaps the most worrying comment after Sunday’s defeat came not in Amorim’s press conference, but from the Brighton manager, Fabian Hurzeler. 

“We knew how Manchester United would play” he said, “and you can prepare for that.” 

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