Ruben Amorim has been terrible at Man United — it surely cannot go on forever

Sir Jim Ratcliffe's stock among Manchester United fans has fallen so quickly that you might not remember when he was seen as a smart man who would fix years of stagnation. It was all the way back in February 2024.

Before the parsimony, protests and placards, before his popularity plummeted further than the latest UK Prime Minister's, the minority owner seemed, well, a bit like the latest UK Prime Minister: an actual grown-up who appeared fit to do the mother of all grown-up jobs. He certainly talked a good game, insisting that sorting out United was "not a simple short-term fix", that getting everything on track was "a two-to-three-season challenge", that they must "walk to the right decision, not run to the wrong one".

United's 2024/25 season, which concludes this week with the Europa League final in Bilbao and a Premier League game with Aston Villa, shows Ratcliffe's predictions were painfully accurate. And maybe he really will steer the club through the mire and into sunlit uplands replete with trophies and positive balance sheets. The problem is that his recent track record doesn't offer much encouragement, not least in his torturously slow walk towards his next big decision to make.

MORE: Latest team news and predicted lineups for Europa League final

Which brings us, through torturously slow introductory paragraphs, to Ruben Amorim.

Another home game, another defeat for Ruben Amorim at Old Trafford in the Premier League 😬 pic.twitter.com/UQVzclInMm

We know that Amorim did not want the United job last November, that the offer came with an ultimatum that would not allow him to wait to take over this summer, when he preferred. We realise he foresaw some of the problems when he forecast a "storm" after a 4-0 win over Everton on December 1 last year, which remains the last time United looked any good in a Premier League game. We understand the mitigating circumstances of (another) huge injury list, training in a building site, and working at a company making sweeping redundancies while dealing with the sort of financial black hole to make even HM Treasury wince over an abacus.

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None of that excuses United's performances over the past six months. Neither will winning the Europa League final on Wednesday against Ange Postecoglou's Tottenham, the Spursiest Spurs that ever Spursed. The patience INEOS have shown towards Amorim and his stultifying methods, especially after they reacted so quickly to the error of giving Erik ten Hag a new deal, is astonishing.

After United lost 1-0 at Chelsea last week — their 18th defeat in 37 league games, and the 15th time this term they failed to score a goal — Amorim's points-per-game ratio in the Premier League stood at 0.92. That figure is lower than that of Paul Jewell, who managed Derby County to a record-low 11 points in 2007/08.

0.92 - Ruben Amorim has won 24 points in 26 Premier League games, a points per game ratio of 0.92. This is lower than Paul Jewell's Premier League points per game (0.94), who managed 24 winless games at Derby when they finished on 11 points in 2007-08. Concerning. pic.twitter.com/ncNV2wHUF6

They were already on course, and by a distance, for their poorest league campaign in modern history. That loss at Stamford Bridge means there is now a statistical argument that Amorim's Manchester United are the worst team the Premier League has ever seen. Ever.

Amorim feared this, we know. He spoke ad nauseam during the winter months about the real risk of relegation, of needing to "shock" the club into action, of how his United were probably the worst in the club's existence. He spoke honestly, passionately, dropping headline-grabbing sound bites while only sometimes dropping his goalkeeper. He has sometimes borrowed from the Ralf Rangnick playbook of excusing his team's performance before it's even happened; or perhaps, if we're feeling cynical, looking to save face amid a crisis he can't resolve. If Rangnick warned of the need for open-heart surgery at United, Amorim has already declared them dead, staged a suitably low-cost wake and asked whether anyone has dibs on the Chevrolet.

But his pointed remarks, aside from pleasing some Permanently Online fans and a few members of the Class of 92, have achieved nothing. At no point has there been concerted improvement in the team he's coaching, an anchor during this tempest he predicted; just gripes about players making mistakes and how terrible it is to be doing the job. Even after thrashing Athletic Club 7-1 on aggregate in the Europa League semis, Amorim's first reaction was to say he was scared of the final.

And the team, as Athletic could tell you, is not that bad. No, really. Eighth place and an FA Cup final win over Manchester City a year ago was supposed to be the absolute nadir for this group, which if anything, is now stronger in terms of personnel. United might have splurged millions on ineffective transfers in the past decade, but they still boast players that should be far, far higher than 16th in the Premier League standings. Arguments about them not suiting Amorim's 3-4-2-1 system also fall flat pretty quickly when you look at others using similar tactics: Vitor Pereira at Wolves (10 wins in 20 games since December, including two over United), or Oliver Glasner at Crystal Palace (FA Cup trophy and 12 wins in 36 games, including two over United). And yes, several United players would get into those teams.

This is all moot, of course. United are not going to sack Amorim after parachuting him in partway through a season that was already on the ropes, even if they lose the Europa League final. For one thing, they spent around £21 million replace Ten Hag and his staff with Amorim and his coaches, and that's not an expense they will want to repeat any time soon; after all, there are only so many free lunches and concessions tickets the 14th most valuable sports franchise in the world can take away.

But the fact that replacing arguably the most ineffective manager in modern English football is not even on the table goes well beyond talk of cost-cutting or project-building. If things don't improve rapidly at the start of 2025/26, it will look like an absurd mistake from Ratcliffe and CEO Omar Berrada. Amorim was not expected to work miracles, but he was supposed to do so much better than this; to develop the blueprint on which United's reconstruction into England's dominant force could be based, not sketch out the footballing equivalent of Homer Simpson's car of the future and tell everyone it's not your fault that the cupholder is too big.

Most of United's matchgoing fans still support Amorim, just as they've backed every manager in the post-Ferguson wilderness. The outcome of the Europa League final probably won't change that. How long Ratcliffe — who has eschewed populist policies in favour of a hard-nosed vision — will do likewise is hard to say. There's only so long you can walk towards a cliff edge.

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