Was Ruben Amorim’s sacking justified or was it another one of the blunders under INEOS as Manchester United’s fight with their own identity continued?
Ruben Amorim’s Manchester United reign always felt like it was being lived in fast-forward. Hired on the promise of a defined idea of structure first, automatisms second, and results as the natural outcome, he walked into a club still trying to decide what it wanted to be.
The early weeks brought the familiar Manchester United whiplash: brief upticks that looked like a corner turned, followed by a run of games that reopened every old wound. Injuries, recruitment hangovers, and a squad built for a different rhythm meant the new coach was constantly translating his philosophy on the fly.
By the time the days leading up to his sacking arrived, the noise had become louder than the performances themselves. A handful of damaging scorelines and a table position that did not match the club’s self-image gave the board an easy headline. Manchester United sold it as a reset. It looked, from the outside, like a retreat.
Were Manchester United right to sack Ruben Amorim?
If Manchester United hired Ruben Amorim for a long-term project, then the most basic question is also the most uncomfortable: when did “long-term” become “until the next bad month”? Clubs can sack managers for poor results; that’s football’s oldest rule. The issue here is that they did not pitch Amorim as a firefighter, but as an architect.
Judging him purely on points is tempting because points are clean. They fit into a tweet, a boardroom deck, a fan argument. But a rebuild is rarely clean, especially when the squad and the wage bill are still shaped by previous plans. If INEOS wanted identity, they needed to accept the messy middle, where performances improve before results stabilise.
Sacking him may still be defensible if the dressing room was lost or standards dropped. Yet if the core problem was “the numbers say we’re close, but the table says we’re not,” then the decision reads less like strategy and more like impatience.
Justified or convenient?
The case against Ruben Amorim was always going to be framed as outcomes. League position. Cup exits. A run that “isn’t Manchester United.” That language is powerful because it carries history, even when history is not a plan.
But the quieter argument, one that reportedly existed inside the building, was that the underlying numbers backed his vision. When a team consistently creates the better chances, concedes fewer high-quality look-ins, and controls territory more often than not, it usually climbs the table over time. Football is not perfectly fair, but it is not random either; trends tend to cash out.
So the sacking lands in that grey area: not wholly irrational, but suspiciously useful. It provides a single figure to blame for a complex set of problems. It also allows leadership to say “we acted,” without answering why the club’s broader direction keeps changing.
Progress without payoff
Manchester United under Ruben Amorim, in this reading, were one of those sides whose performances looked more coherent than their results. Expected points based on attacking and chance quality cannot guarantee wins, but they can show whether the team is learning how to win. And in patches, Amorim’s men looked like they were.
There were signs of a team developing repeatable habits: more controlled build-up, clearer spacing between lines, and more consistent access to dangerous central zones instead of hopeful wide deliveries. Even when games swung, you could often see the outline of what Amorim wanted; press triggers, rest-defence positioning, and a preference for attacking with structure rather than chaos.
The problem is that Manchester United have lived on chaos for years. A structured team that misses its chances can look “toothless,” while a chaotic team that nicks a win looks “United again.” That contrast shapes narratives, and narratives shape decisions.
INEOS and the danger of fluctuating calls
INEOS arrived promising modernisation: smarter football decisions, aligned departments, and fewer emotional swings. Yet the club’s recent history has made “decisive” feel like “reactive.” The indecision around Erik ten Hag after the FA Cup win became a reference point: a club torn between celebrating a trophy and acknowledging a league season that did not fit the ambition, especially based on numbers that lay underneath an already depleted position on the table.
Amorim’s timeline—sticking with him through a painful European defeat, then acting later—adds to the sense of a leadership group that keeps choosing the hardest moment to change course. If you believe a coach is not the one, the cleanest exit is usually when the season ends and squad planning begins. If you believe he is the one, you protect the process when short-term results wobble.
Doing neither convincingly makes the club look like it is trying to be rational and emotional at the same time. That is not balance; it is drift; it is almost amateurish.
Was Ruben Amorim’s back three really the problem?
Ruben Amorim’s preference for a back-three became the most repeatable talking point because it is visible. Fans can see the shape on the teamsheet and decide, instantly, that it is either progressive or cowardly. But shape is the starting point, not the whole story.
A back three can be attacking if the wing-backs play high, the wide centre-backs step into midfield, and the front line pins opponents deep. It can also be conservative if the wing-backs sit, the midfield gets outnumbered, and the front three become isolated. The question is not “back three or back four.” It is whether the squad has the profiles to make the chosen structure dangerous.
Manchester United’s longer-term project should have been about building a team that can dominate games in multiple ways. If the club hired Amorim knowing his core model, then turning around and treating the model itself as the flaw suggests the recruitment and coaching hire were never truly aligned.
Wilcox, style clashes, and the real fault line
Reports that Jason Wilcox wanted a change in playing style while Amorim wanted to retain the back-three approach point to a deeper issue: who actually owns the football idea at Manchester United?
In a well-run club, the sporting leadership defines the principles—pressing intensity, build-up preferences, squad profiles—and the head coach implements them with his own details. At Manchester United, the pattern has often been reversed: the coach arrives with a worldview, recruitment compromises around it, then leadership changes its mind midway and calls it “evolution.”
If Wilcox and Amorim were pulling in different directions, that conflict should have been resolved before it became public-facing in performances and eventually, emotional comments. Either you back the coach’s model and recruit accordingly, or you hire a coach whose model matches the internal blueprint. Doing neither turns tactics into politics.
A power play disguised as a football decision?
The more you look at it, the more the sacking risks reading like a power play, even if not necessarily in a moustache-twirling way; football power plays are often banal. They look like “we need alignment.” They sound like “we can’t wait.” They move like “we have to protect the club.”
But the timing, the messaging, and the focus on stylistic disagreement suggest a club eager to reassert control after a period where the coach’s identity had become the project’s identity. That can happen when the leadership is not fully confident in its own plan. Removing the manager becomes a way to reset the hierarchy: the club is the idea, not the coach.
The irony is that Manchester United’s recent history suggests they do not suffer from managers having too much power. They suffer from the absence of a stable, shared definition of what “good” looks like.
Manchester United did not just sack Ruben Amorim; they also quietly questioned the very premise of hiring him. The easiest defence will be that results forced their hand, that the table does not lie, that Old Trafford demands momentum. Yet this is the same club that has repeatedly asked supporters to be patient with rebuilds, only to treat patience like a luxury item that disappears at the first serious wobble.
Amorim’s teams, by the logic of the underlying numbers, make slow progress before they win consistently. Expected goals, expected points, and chance profiles are not excuses; they are signposts. When those signposts point toward progress and the club still swerves off the road, it suggests fear, fear of optics, fear of another “lost season,” fear of being the ones blamed for not acting.
In that sense, Amorim looks less like a failed long-term appointment and more like the latest figure placed in front of the consequences of muddled leadership despite the changes behind the scenes. Manchester United did not only throw him under the bus; they used him as proof that they are doing something, while the harder work—decisive alignment, coherent recruitment, and a stable football identity—remains unfinished. In a long play, he becomes just another victim.
