The 3 hardest roles for Rúben Amorim to fill at Manchester United

Rúben Amorim is not yet the Manchester United manager as of the publishing of this newsletter, despite Fabrizio Romano giving it the ol’ here we go. Amorim has agreed to take the job and United has agreed to pay €10m compensation to Sporting Lisbon, but there are a couple of administrative holdups. Even if Amorim is not in the building when United host Chelsea this weekend, he should be in the job shortly.

Amorim’s appointment will come with a massive change in style of play for Manchester United. He’s almost exclusively played a 3-4-3 system since taking over as Sporting manager, with only minor adjustments for some big games and player absences. In addition to the big shape differences, Sporting also press much more aggressively than Erik ten Hag’s Man United ever did.

If you’d like to learn more about Amorim’s Sporting and how his system works, I highly recommend this video from Statman Dave, which he put out 6 months ago when Amorim was linked to the Liverpool job. He goes into detail about early buildup, in possession patterns of play, pressing structure, and out of possession shape.

Some of United’s out of form players could get new leases on life at Old Trafford under the new boss, while a handful of others might find themselves offered out for transfer or loan come January. The decision to appoint Amorim represents a huge shift in identity for United, and one I’m not sure the squad and upper management are ready for.

This is in no way a criticism of Rúben Amorim himself — I think he’s an excellent coach, and I think it’s possible for his system to work successfully at the highest level of the game. He has the potential to be a brilliant appointment for United, but only if there’s a good plan in place to build the right squad for his style of football.

Similar things could have been (and were) said about the appointment of ten Hag, who abandoned his principles once he decided the squad were incapable of playing the way he wanted, entering a mediocrity death spiral. He had a squad built half for his style of football, half for something else, and took the club increasingly farther away from tactics he enjoyed or was good at coaching.

Amorim might be a bit more dogmatic about his system, which is reportedly why Liverpool preferred Arne Slot to him last year, and time will tell if that’s good or bad for United.

I am skeptical of Amorim’s appointment and the overall United project because the way the club has been run — both longer term since Alex Ferguson’s retirement and extremely recently under Ineos — do not suggest coherent long-term planning.

Not only was ten Hag extended over the summer, a significant amount of resources went into backing him and trying to enable his success. He was allowed to hire staff he knew personally, and 9 figures worth of money was spent on players he knew personally. Several ten Hag-requested signings — Joshua Zirkzee, Matthijs de Ligt and Noussair Mazraoui — are far from the ideal profiles for Amorim’s system. They might work out fine in the end, because he’s a good coach and they’re decent players, but their signings suggest that United had no idea that they were going to fire ten Hag at the first sign of trouble and preparing to move on to an Amorim-like substance if the manager failed to turn things around.

Amorim now has the difficult task of implementing his favored system with a fairly incoherent squad. Some players will fit right in — an Ugarte-Mainoo midfield is the kind of thing Amorim might have picked out himself — but others will need to learn new roles quickly.

Here are three big problem areas:

Right center back

Long-term, Leny Yoro should fit Amorim’s outside center back profile very well. He’s comfortable with the ball at his feet and good at both playing medium-range passes that break a line of the press, and carrying the ball forward. He’ll need to bulk up a bit and improve the speed of his decision-making, but that’s every 19-year-old center back ever.

Short-term, Yoro is injured, and will probably need the rest of the season to get up to speed and prepare to become a key player next campaign. For the rest of this year, Amorim has a slew of extremely imperfect solutions available to him. All of them are pretty lacking in athleticism, which is a problem given how attacking Amorim’s wingbacks are, and how much space that leaves the outside center backs to cover.

My best guess is that he’ll settle on de Ligt playing outside right and Harry Maguire in the center, just to get his best center backs on the pitch regardless of system fit. But I suspect this will be the biggest problem for Amorim to sort out, and United’s downfall for the rest of the season. Amorim’s system is very dependent on the outside center backs to be both athletic space closers out of possession and dynamic ball progressers in possession. Every option available stinks at one of those two things.

United’s long-term success under Amorim hinges heavily on Yoro developing quickly or the club spending a lot of money on a plug-and-play solution in this position.

Left wingback

This is a problem I actually expect Amorim to be able to solve, even if I don’t know what the solution is yet.

Amorim bucks the inverted fullback trend, asking his outside center backs to step up and his wingers to pinch in to create midfield overloads, while the wingbacks stay wide. As such, he likes them to be able to cross, which likely rules out Mazraoui or Diego Dalot from filling this role. We’re either going to see Harry Amass promoted from the academy, or one of United’s wingers converted to this role.

Antony has shown a poor attitude when asked to fill in at left back during injury crises, but if Amorim can change his mind, it could be a way to revive his rapidly dying career. I think the more likely move is Amad Diallo, a totally decent but unspectacular winger who could become a star left wingback in Amorim’s tactics.

This guy can’t shoot, but runs, dribbles, and crosses a lot? That’s a back 3 wingback to me boss.

Bruno’s best role and associated dominoes

Sporting coach takes over job where Sporting legend is the captain, a match made in heaven? I am… not so sure. He seems pretty specifically the No. 10 in a 4-2-3-1 or most attacking midfielder in a 4-3-3 to me, and I’m not sure if he fits well into any role in Amorim’s system.

I think Bruno could play the No. 8 role, but has less press-resistant qualities than Mainoo. He could play the left wing, but that puts Rashford or Garnacho into roles they’ll be less effective in, or benches them entirely. I think the best role for him and the team might be on the right, even if Amorim prefers left-footers there. He’ll probably still make the kind of inside movements a left-footer would from that spot, if only just because he’s used to being a 10 and wants to occupy those central spaces.

The presence of Rashford and Garnacho — two extremely talented right-footed wingers who are best on the left — could lead to Amorim basically mirroring his Sporting setup. Instead of having his more winger-like player on the right and 10-like player on the left, he could flip them, and in turn flip the sides that the more defensive midfielder and fullback operate on.

Whatever Amorim does with Bruno, he’ll need to get him to stop taking so many bad shots. This has likely been a product of Man United’s attack being poor as a whole, and Bruno lacking good passing options, but this is still unacceptable from your captain. —KM

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