The Athletic’s revelation that Ruben Amorim reacted to Manchester United’s latest calamitous performance by taking out his frustrations on a defenceless television, called to mind a few things.
Firstly, you do wonder: have United broken him already? It’s only been two months, but it seems like a long way from the testimony from some of those who played for him before he moved to England.
Take this, from Braga player Fransergio, who told The Athletic back in November: “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.”
And this, from Bruno Simao, who played for Amorim at Casa Pia and has known him since they were children: “He knows that he cannot react badly, because this will pass to his players… He remains calm. You get angry but you don’t pass this to the players.”
It’s not that he was previously a Zen master who reacted to even the most vexing setback only by meditating and tending to his yucca plant. Other people we spoke to did confirm that he gets angry when things go wrong, it’s just that in general he was pretty good at keeping his temper in check in front of his players.
Now, though, someone is having to fix a TV because he wasn’t able — or chose not to — control that temper in the United dressing room. Not a shock, perhaps: after watching some of his team’s performances since he arrived in England, the surprise is it took this long, or that it was only an electrical item that he broke.
But that perhaps feeds into the second point: before joining United, he never really had many opportunities to be upset about a setback, because there were barely any of them.
His first job was a brief spell at Casa Pia in the Portuguese third division, where after losing his first two games he happened upon his trademark 3-4-2-1 formation and they went on an unbeaten run that set the team on course for promotion, even though he stepped down before the end of the season.
Then he joined Braga, where after taking charge of the first team he won the Taca da Liga (the Portuguese League Cup) and went unbeaten in the league, a run that included Braga’s first away victory at Benfica in 65 years.
That short spell went so brilliantly it persuaded Sporting CP to pay what looked like a ridiculous €20million buyout clause to make him their coach. He won the title — Sporting’s first in 19 years — and the Taca da Liga in his first full season in 2020-21, finished second and won another Taca da Liga in 2021-22, then fourth in 2022-23 after losing three key players, and won the title again in his fourth full season and was unbeaten when United came calling last November.
He managed a total of 231 games for Sporting over four years and eight months, during which time he never lost more than two games in a row — never mind the seven defeats in 15 games he has suffered so far at United.
These are still ludicrously early days in his tenure, as such we can’t draw firm conclusions about his success or otherwise at United, but as a coach he has never really had to deal with failure like this before.
Thus, it’s fascinating to see how he is dealing with it. It could be deliberate, a more calculated attempt to express his displeasure in an impactful way, contrasting with his usually calm demeanour.
Amorim has enjoyed so much success in his coaching career so far (Photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)
If not, a best guess is that he does not know how to deal with this degree of failure, which is perhaps why you see him damaging TVs, or declaring that they are the “worst United team of all time”, or saying they could get relegated. A reductive interpretation of all of those things could be of a coach unravelling, but a much more likely explanation is that he is being faced with something so unfamiliar he can’t yet quite wrap his head around how to react.
And that brings us onto a third point, specifically about his reaction to the performance against Brighton & Hove Albion, which is whether there is actually a place for such angry outbursts in modern football.
There was a time when violent outbursts — usually verbal, sometimes physical — were pretty common from managers. The most infamous came in the very dressing room where now sits a broken widescreen, when Sir Alex Ferguson was so livid with the performance of David Beckham that he kicked a boot into the midfielder’s face, just one such example of the great man expressing his temper in forthright terms.
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But there are countless others, ranging from Tony Pulis allegedly ‘headbutting’ James Beattie after a Stoke City game (an incident he described, to the BBC, as a “fracas”), to the fabled occasion when Grimsby Town manager Brian Laws fractured forward Ivano Bonetti’s cheekbone with a plate of chicken wings.
Things tend to be slightly more measured now, tempers less likely to be lost. Those of a certain disposition or mentality might see it as a sign of people going soft, that young players these days are snowflakes and they can’t cope with criticism, especially when it’s delivered in robust fashion.
But it’s probably more likely that managers are much more selective about the occasions when they dial it up. In 2023, Morgan Gibbs-White told Sky Sports that then Nottingham Forest manager Steve Cooper only lost his temper once all season, following a defeat by Brentford: given this was a campaign when Forest lost 18 league games and looked certain for relegation until the closing weeks, there were plenty of occasions for him to unleash his anger, but he knew doing it too many times would be counter-productive, and would lose its impact.
Perhaps this was a more calculated move on Amorim’s part than it might seem. Perhaps this wasn’t a man unable to control his temper, but one trying to make clear to his players that their performance was unacceptable by using the shock factor of an angry outburst. Perhaps he didn’t know how else to react, other than with anger.
Perhaps later, we will look back upon this as a minor incident, a small blip in the difficult early days before Amorim figures things out at United. But it’s certainly fascinating to see how he is dealing with such a turbulent time at Old Trafford.
(Photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images)
