Faces covered, they assaulted anyone in sight and smashed up the changing rooms. Striker Bas Dost, who had scored 34 goals that season, was left with cuts to his face. The manager, Jorge Jesus, and other senior players were targeted.
A club that had once been part of Portugal’s ‘Big Three’ at the turn of the century, had watched for decades as it became more of a ‘Big Two’ of Benfica and Porto, who shared 18 of the 20 Primeira Liga titles between Sporting’s last and the first of Amorim’s era.
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Read MoreWith a squad that had lost Raphinha, Bas Dost and Bruno Fernandes, and with little reinvestment in players, Amorim promoted youth, developed his 3-4-2-1 formation and fine-tuned its balance of rigidity and fluidity, and discovered alchemy few others have produced.
Amorim’s rise traces a similar character arc to previous Manchester United managers.
Manchester United have turned into a black hole for football coaches – an irresistible vortex that sucks them in and tears them apart. A dead red supergiant taking everything else with it.
Amorim’s rise traces a similar character arc to previous United managers (Photo: Getty)
Listen to people who know and have worked with Amorim discuss his time at Sporting and they say many glowing things – a great tactician, motivator, trusting, smart. But the main takeaway is that he is, at heart, a nice guy. He didn’t have the greatest playing career, it was frustrated and cut short by injuries, so he’s had to grift and graft. And the humility learned along the way has never left him.
Four months into his Manchester United career, he is unrecognisable.
He’s been on a four-game losing streak, a six-game winless run, lost more than half his games at Old Trafford.
It will have been a startling, bewildering experience for a coach who only recently turned 40 and is still, really, making his way in the game. You only hope he can recover from it.
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Read MoreTen Hag was considered one of the finest coaches in Europe for his body of work at Ajax but will likely land at a club where he must piece together a shattered reputation. RB Leipzig are reported to be tempted.
Even Ruud van Nistelrooy appears to have been touched by the curse: many felt his three wins and a draw in that brief four-game spell as caretaker should’ve earned him the United job until the end of the season, yet he has now led Leicester City steadily down into the relegation places.
Jose Mourinho had seemed like an out-of-depth, slowly disintegrating mess by the time he left United, wildly flashing three fingers at anyone who looked his way before being swiftly escorted out of the building. His career has gone downhill.
Louis van Gaal and Ralf Rangnick have not set foot in club football since leaving Carrington.
These are all, in their own unique ways, decent managers, sharing between them scores of trophies. The common denominator of their demise is Manchester United.
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