The Reality of Ruben: Why it ended for the Portuguese Prodigy at Old Trafford.

by David Best

 

Ruben Amorim has been sacked after just over a year into his tenure as Manchester United manager. Despite results seemingly picking up in the gaffer’s second season in charge, dispute with club leadership cost him his job. However, these disputes were routed in his stubbornness surrounding his footballing system. Ruben plays an unorthodox formation of 3-4-2-1, with three centre-backs, two wingbacks, a double pivot in the midfield and two attacking midfielders behind the striker. In Portugal, he had remarkable success with this system, leading Sporting Lisbon to multiple dominant league titles and making them serious contenders in Europe. So, why didn’t this work at United?

 Well, to put it simply, the players at his disposal could scarcely have been less suited to his footballing philosophy. Amorim-ball requires highly specialised player profiles because the roles they must perform are very specific and not commonly used by most teams. The area of the pitch where this was most obvious were the wingbacks. Amorim’s system lives and dies by these two positions. The whole idea of a back three formation is that the wingbacks maintain width high upon the pitch in possession but run back to support the defence and form a back five while out of possession in a defensive phase. Of course, this entails massive amounts of running up and down the sides of the pitch which requires the players to have extremely high levels of fitness, pace, and stamina. Additionally, to these attributes, the wingbacks have to be proficient in both attacking and defensive football. When you combine all these features, you find very few players that fit the profile needed.

 The fullbacks that were available to the manager, Shaw, Dalot, Malacia and Mazraoui, were drastically out of their depth when asked to play as a wingback rather than traditional fullback. Amorim also struggled in essentially every other area of the pitch,

especially in his first season. With the double pivot in midfield having to be made up mostly of a mix between players who were traditional defensive midfielders and others who were traditional number 10’s. With almost every team in the league using a midfield three, the double pivot centre routinely found themselves overrun. This shouldn’t be an issue, because in a perfect world, the two 10’s behind the striker would drop back to support the midfielders (who would be industrious number 8’s rather than out of position 6’s and10’s), however, with players unfit to play those roles as well due to the team only really having traditional wingers rather than Ruben’s inside 10’s, the nightmare of the trophy-less 15th place finish almost wrote itself.

 Ultimately, Ruben’s unwillingness to effectively adapt his system to fit the players he had was the biggest problem. We did see a brief adaptation to a back 4 against Newcastle on Boxing Day, but then a confusing return to his ways the next game.