“Sometimes he would almost feel like a big brother. He had all the respect you should have for a coach, but you had a connection with him, you felt you could talk to him about anything.”
Tiago Tomas has more reason to thank Ruben Amorim than most. The midfielder was 17 when Amorim arrived at Sporting in 2020 and was yet to make his first-team debut. But Amorim gave him a chance, and the following season he became a fixture in the Sporting side that won the Portuguese title for the first time in 19 years.
His sentiments are representative of those who have played for the new Manchester United head coach. It’s hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about the 39-year-old. This is common when a new coach with a burgeoning reputation arrives in the Premier League (you may remember similarly glowing accounts when Erik ten Hag was appointed at United), so these testimonies do not guarantee success.
But Amorim, in an admittedly short coaching career, has yet to fail. From listening to those who have worked with him, the thing that keeps coming up to explain his record is how he forms a connection with his players.
“His relationship and how he connects with his players is what makes the biggest difference,” says Tomas. “When you have the trust of the coach, it gives you a freedom — you’re not worried about having to perform. You have to perform, but he gives you a tranquility and team spirit that I’d never felt before.”
Amorim got the Sporting job after an incredibly impressive, whirlwind few months at Braga, in which he stepped up from coaching their B team and took the struggling side up the league, partly thanks to a 10-game unbeaten run which included victories at Porto and Benfica, as well as over his future employers Sporting.
“He’s very calm, and he’s someone who sees everyone not only as professionals but also as human beings,” offers the midfielder Fransergio, who played in that Braga team. “He would often inquire about our families, he would check on how foreign players were adjusting to life in Portugal.”
He tries to create a sense of equality in his squad, as illustrated by a couple of examples. Sebastian Coates, Sporting captain for most of Amorim’s tenure until he left for Nacional in Uruguay in the summer, told ESPN Uruguay about how he treated the veteran French defender Jeremy Mathieu, who was older than his coach when the two worked together in Lisbon.
“He was the one Amorim demanded the most from when he arrived. Sometimes you defer to your elders, but here we are all equal.”
At the other end of that scale, the midfielder Bruno Xadas, who he also worked with at Braga, had been out for a long spell with injury when Amorim arrived in 2019, but he tells The Athletic a story about the way that he was brought back into the group.
“In one training session before a game, I wasn’t going to start, so I was watching them practise set pieces, until he asked me to take the direct free kicks. He insisted and prodded me a little, so I went to take one. The first direct free kick I scored… I went to take the second and scored again, and the third in a row I scored again. He laughed and told me to go take a shower.”
Another theme comes up a lot: communication. “Mister Amorim makes things very clear to the players,” Morten Hjulmand, the current Sporting captain, told Portuguese newspaper Record recently. “(He is clear) about his vision, about the game, about how he sees your character and how you can improve. He is very good at knowing how he can make his players better. How he needs to treat one player and another player differently.”
“He was always sincere, upfront and clear about what he wanted for the team and the players,” adds Xadas. “He’s direct, he makes his ideas very easy to understand.”
Words are one thing. But perhaps the best indicator of how closely his players have identified with him is how the most in-demand of them all seems to be tying his future with Amorim’s. Viktor Gyokeres has scored 66 goals in 67 games in all competitions since joining from Coventry City in 2023.
He remained at Sporting last summer despite strong interest from elsewhere and, according to his agent Hasan Cetinkaya, he took that decision broadly because of Amorim.
“I would say that at this point it is also very important to know… what will happen with Ruben Amorim,” he told Record in April, about the prospects of the Swedish striker leaving Lisbon. “Because we came here because of him. We have to know what Sporting’s plans are.”
Amorim joined Sporting on March 4, 2020. On March 8 he took charge of his first game, a 2-0 win over Aves. On March 12, like most leagues across Europe, Portuguese football was suspended because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The timing was terrible, but also had its advantages: Amorim was able to stop, take stock, think about his players, assess who would and would not be part of his squad. One of the men to benefit from this was Tomas, promoted to the first team from the youth setup and given his senior debut when football resumed.
His youth — Amorim was only 35 when he arrived at Sporting — could be regarded as a potential disadvantage. Inexperience, naivety, lack of gravitas.
But you can also make it an advantage. When you’re still of the same generation as most of the players, or maybe even just a decade older than them rather than 30, 40 years their senior, you’re theoretically more likely to be able to relate to them.
“It’s something I noticed: not only with him, but in general young coaches have more of a relationship with the players, and the way they behave,” explains Tomas. “I also worked with Sebastian Hoeness at Stuttgart, and he also had this connection and relationship with the players. In modern football, people adapt, and young coaches do this more often. Because of this, they can understand the players more.”
United players can expect a tough time on the training ground. “He works you,” Marcus Edwards, the English midfielder who flourished under Amorim at Sporting, told the Independent in 2022. “He makes you want to be the best version of yourself. He’s constantly chatting to me in training, getting me used to the system and the way the team plays.”
Fransergio backs that up: “He used to joke that we would suffer during the week so that we could smile at the weekend.”
There is a narrative that Amorim is fairly tactically inflexible, and it’s true to a point: he rarely strays from some version of a 3-4-3 formation, but his former players dispute the idea that he is dogmatic or one-dimensional.
“They say there is no plan B, but his idea is to use the same system with variants,” Coates told Portuguese sports newspaper A Bola. “The variables are the players.”
Tomas, who is now excelling with Wolfsburg in the Bundesliga, adds that Amorim is not an ideologue in the manner of someone like Marcelo Bielsa or Ange Postecoglou, but will adapt and change his approach if he deems it appropriate in the situation. “Technically, normally he plays in the same system, but you see new dynamics and new movements, even though it’s the same system,” he says. “In some games, we didn’t play good-looking or beautiful football — sometimes we were pragmatic and direct, and defended well.”
During games, he tends not to micromanage the team from the sidelines, broadly because he tries to prepare the players for every eventuality, to the point that they react instinctively to a changing game.
“He always wants to make sure that everything is 100 per cent in preparation for each game,” Gyokeres told Record last December. “He always wants to make sure that we know what we have to do in each specific match. He also always knows what needs to be done tactically, both offensively and defensively.”
“He’s not a coach who is always screaming,” adds Tomas. “He’ll make some changes and corrections, but with him all the players know exactly what to do in every phase of the game.”
Xadas adds another voice to that idea. “He gives instructions and ideas about the game, but he also gives freedom to the player’s talent. When you go on the field with him, you know everything you have to do at every moment of the game.”
Given there have not been many bumps in the road, perhaps the most interesting thing about Amorim’s prospects at United is what happens when things go wrong.
According to Bruno Simao, who played for Amorim at Casa Pia (where he worked before joining Braga) and has known him since they were children, he tries to keep his anger from the players.
“He knows that he cannot react badly,” Simao told The Athletic, “because this will pass to his players and he can react badly on the outside but with his players the message that he gives is that it is still possible. Don’t get angry, don’t get stressed, do what they know.
“He remains calm. You get angry but you don’t pass this to the players. If a player misses passes, he will shout at him but they know how he is. He shouts because he’s angry but not with them. It’s to push the players to their best. But he changed a little bit because he was getting angrier but now slowly, even with the referees, everything is starting to change.”
Fransergio concurs. “He isn’t shaken by defeats. He is calm in his words, his expressions, and his posture. You won’t see him swearing or throwing things. I think he comes from the same school as Abel Ferreira and Pep Guardiola. Whether they win or lose, they stay on the same level. He knows exactly what his players need to do.”
It might not be great for his blood pressure, but it seems as if Amorim has taken a deliberate decision to keep his anger beneath the surface: unlike his most significant predecessor, there won’t be many hairdryer moments at Old Trafford. Don’t talk to him immediately after a defeat, though.
“You see it on his face when he’s losing games,” says Simao. “Sometimes I speak to his mother to say I really need to speak to Ruben. She says, ‘Bruno, I know to only speak with him the day after. The day of the game no way, I leave him be because he is angry and he can react badly’.”
It sounds like United have got a perfect replacement for Ten Hag. Whether this will actually translate into success, who knows? But what does seem certain is that they have made their most interesting managerial appointment of the post-Ferguson years.
(Top photos: Getty Images and DeFodi Images; design by Eamonn Dalton)
