The seven managers Man Utd ruined – and if Amorim will be next ...Middle East

To put into context how significant Ruben Amorim’s achievements were at Sporting Lisbon it is worth revisiting May 2018 and the afternoon a mob of 50 fans forced entry to the club’s Alcochete training ground and attacked players and staff.

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.

The month before, Bruno de Carvalho, the club president, had suspended 19 first-team players, over a social media row.

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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Sporting were at their lowest ebb and, in truth, nobody seriously thought Amorim was the answer when, less than two years after the training ground ambush, he was plucked from relative obscurity, in his mid-30s, in charge of Braga’s first-team for only three months. His €10m buyout clause was the fourth-highest fee paid for a coach in the league.

With 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.

A league and cup double in the first season, a second title in four seasons followed. Marca, the Spanish newspaper, described him as “Sporting’s saviour”.

Amorim’s rise traces a similar character arc to previous Manchester United managers.

It can be easy to forget, but David Moyes was the most highly-regarded British coach in the Premier League for his 11 years at Everton. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had been quietly building his reputation, with a handful of trophies coaching United’s reserves then the top-flight title and domestic cup in homeland Norway. Erik ten Hag taking winning everything in the Netherlands and taking Ajax deep into the Champions League with style and substance feels like a distant memory nowadays.

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.

Ruben Amorim has become its latest victim.

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.

He was charming, charismatic, had a sense of humour, was as adept at handling the media as choosing the right tactics and players.

Four months into his Manchester United career, he is unrecognisable.

In one TV interview after the recent Crystal Palace defeat – his eighth in 19 games – Amorim looked nervous, agitated, uncertain, frequently scratching his face, eyes downcast. As though he’d just been let out of a dark room in which he’d been tortured for weeks with questions about Marcus Rashford to plea for a ransom to be paid.

He’s been on a four-game losing streak, a six-game winless run, lost more than half his games at Old Trafford.

He has been criticised for sticking too rigidly to the system which got him the job, for his handling of Rashford, for making United worse.

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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Solskjaer was without a managerial job more than three years after being sacked by Manchester United, finally emerging from the wilderness in Turkey at Besiktas last month on 15 January.

Ten 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.

Moyes was so jaded by the whole turbulent experience – 11 months that seemed to take 11 years off his life – he spent the next half-decade as a point of ridicule in popular culture and a punchline for pundits before he seemed anything like the astute, fierce coach who had presided over a period of sustained success and stability at Everton.

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.

And it isn’t only the up-and-coming coach whose soul United crushes.

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.

If there are a level of clubs – a Brighton & Hove Albion, a Bournemouth, an Everton – that act as a stepping stone up to that exclusive elite, Manchester United have become a step down: a place to languish miserably for a few years before finding a demotion, or opting for a different pace of life, elsewhere.

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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