Then don't comment on something if you're prepared to do a little reading.
The Ruben Amorim Thread | enter at your own peril | In talks with AC Milan
- Thread starter Ayush_reddevil
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In the latest edition of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) chats to author, Dan Williamson, about his new book 'If I Hadnt Seen Such Riches' which chronicles our 1990/91 European Cup Winners Cup victory, which is a trip down memory lane for those old enough to remember it and a vital history lesson for those who don't.
No, I left out defenders on both sides pretty much. They're really not far off in terms of quality. On paper De Ligt should be miles clear of Smalling, but has he really been?
And he got Pogba, Ibrahimovic, Mkhitaryan and Bailly the same summer as he joined..? Are you here saying Mourinho had a worse squad than Amorim when the season started?
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Absolutely not.
He was left with a shitter squad but by the time the season started it was miles better yes.
Thing is LVG made that shit squad win the FA Cup and finish top 8, as did EtH with his poor squad.
One head coach though, apparently he could only coach a squad full of World Class players
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By the way, the stat nerds who want to cling to Amorim's reported amazing xG statistics can suck on this piece of math that I just did.
Obviously if we're looking at xG we can't just look at xG for. We have to look at xG against as well. A team can set up to go all out in attack and create loads of chances at the cost of being wide open at the back, so the only way to correctly judge xG is by looking at xG for and xG against so we get a net xG. Presumably, if this is a positive number, the higher it is, the more we should be winning games, and the opposite if the number is negative.
I've only looked at the games against opponents they both played against this season (which omits the games against Brighton, Wolves x2 and Burnley for Amorim and against Leeds for Carrick). That gives us a sample size of the 15 games they managed against Nottingham Forest, Sunderland, Liverpool, Brentford, Chelsea, Bournemouth, Aston Villa, Newcastle, Crystal Palace, Everton, West Ham, Spurs, Fulham, Arsenal and Man City.
In those 15 games the "xG for" was as follows:
Carrick: 25.26 (or an average of 1.68 xG per game)
Amorim: 24.77 (or an average of 1.65 xG per game)
The "xG against" was:
Carrick: 18.55 (or an average of 1.24 xG per game)
Amorim: 22.54 (or an average of 1.5 xG per game)
That gives Carrick a net xG of 0.45 and Amorim a net xG of 0.15.
In other words, under Carrick we can expect to score slightly more goals and concede fewer goals per game than under Amorim. He outperforms Amorim on both metrics.
All the people bemoaning the fact that Amorim's system was so amazing and underperformed due to poor finishing and bad luck can do one. The statistics clearly show that Carrick is getting more out of his attack than Amorim, and is able to do so while remaining more defensively solid.
Obviously if we're looking at xG we can't just look at xG for. We have to look at xG against as well. A team can set up to go all out in attack and create loads of chances at the cost of being wide open at the back, so the only way to correctly judge xG is by looking at xG for and xG against so we get a net xG. Presumably, if this is a positive number, the higher it is, the more we should be winning games, and the opposite if the number is negative.
I've only looked at the games against opponents they both played against this season (which omits the games against Brighton, Wolves x2 and Burnley for Amorim and against Leeds for Carrick). That gives us a sample size of the 15 games they managed against Nottingham Forest, Sunderland, Liverpool, Brentford, Chelsea, Bournemouth, Aston Villa, Newcastle, Crystal Palace, Everton, West Ham, Spurs, Fulham, Arsenal and Man City.
In those 15 games the "xG for" was as follows:
Carrick: 25.26 (or an average of 1.68 xG per game)
Amorim: 24.77 (or an average of 1.65 xG per game)
The "xG against" was:
Carrick: 18.55 (or an average of 1.24 xG per game)
Amorim: 22.54 (or an average of 1.5 xG per game)
That gives Carrick a net xG of 0.45 and Amorim a net xG of 0.15.
In other words, under Carrick we can expect to score slightly more goals and concede fewer goals per game than under Amorim. He outperforms Amorim on both metrics.
All the people bemoaning the fact that Amorim's system was so amazing and underperformed due to poor finishing and bad luck can do one. The statistics clearly show that Carrick is getting more out of his attack than Amorim, and is able to do so while remaining more defensively solid.
Of course we improved a bit - we spent £200 million on a new attack. The football was still awful though and we routinely dropped soft points against teams who were there for the taking, repeatedly failing to move into the top four because we choked every time we had the chance. We’d often retreat into our shell conceding an inevitable equalizer and then fail to actually push for a win. Our approach was cowardly and our mentality was awful, with Amorim’s late CB subs when chasing a goal becoming meme worthy.
There were such obvious issues with his system which left us exposed - CBs looking looking vulnerable being pulled into the channels because they never looked properly organized in a three. Case and Bruno always getting brutally exposed by runners when the opposition bypassed our press, then exposing our CBs. Dalot getting on the ball in the final third more than Bruno was.
There’s plenty of room for improvement, but we look so much more balanced and hard to beat now.
*football. Football lives and dies by results.
Where does results get you?
It's all nonsense anyway.
Whatever stats and underlying metrics they want to bring up try and prove that there was some sort of progress under Amorim are immediately refuted by his inability to improve results.
He had a 38% win rate last season. He was sacked and it was still at 38%. He simply couldn't reliably win football matches.
He is statistically the worst managerial appointment since Frank O'Farrell in 1971, and the third worst since Herbert Bamlett in 1931.
If you discount Lal Hilditch's brief spell as player manager in 1926/27 (and you should, because it was basically a caretaker position before they were really a thing), Amorim is the 5th worst manager of all time.
O'Farrell and McGuinness immediately followed Busby's two spells, Bamlett was managing us when we nearly went bankrupt, and the other managed us during WW1
You're not necessarily wrong but reading this gave me a laugh, talking about managers you've never seen in a completely different era of football to strengthen your view is quite funnyAmorim was, by any metric, a failure at United. That said, I really think there is a very good coach in there, and that he will go on to have a successful career.
I also believe his time at United will prove to be a humbling lesson that will make him a better coach and help him understand that being absolutely inflexible about a formation - especially when you clearly do not have the players to play it - is not a sign of strength, but a sign of immaturity.
Time will tell. But if he learns from the experience instead of doubling down on the same mistakes, this spell at United could end up being the making of him as a top-level coach.
I also believe his time at United will prove to be a humbling lesson that will make him a better coach and help him understand that being absolutely inflexible about a formation - especially when you clearly do not have the players to play it - is not a sign of strength, but a sign of immaturity.
Time will tell. But if he learns from the experience instead of doubling down on the same mistakes, this spell at United could end up being the making of him as a top-level coach.
Never really understood the hate Amorim gets. Yes he was shit. Yes we played awful and he has the worst winning % out of any united manager. Yes he was unable to cool calm in the face of adversity and really went off on one at times. Yes he randomly made Mainoo his enemy. Yes his reputation plummeted when a caretaker manager came in and did 5 times better. But my god you'll never meet a manager who is so stubborn as to stick to a terrible formation that doesn't work as much as him.
This is like the opposite of the "What have the Romans ever done for us?" scene.
Why is it funny?
It's very easy to find this information.
Statistically, Amorim stands above only the guy who saw most of his tenure fall during the First World War, a bloke who spent half a season as player-manager in the 1920s before simply rejoining the squad, the guy that managed us while we were on the verge of bankruptcy in the late 1920s/early 30s, and the two who had fairly short stints after Busby's two spells in charge.
Amorim has by far the worst record of any post-Fergie manager, objectively the worst record of any manager of the last 50+ years, as well as one of the worst we've ever had.
Despite the attempts of you and a select group of others, there is no positive spin that can be put on his record as manager, and no reasonable mitigation to excuse his inability to win football matches.
The fact you have to go back to "a completely different era" to find anyone with a worse record than him just makes him look worse, if anything.
For context, Carrick could fail to win any of our next 12 matches and still have a better win rate than Amorim.
That’s an incredible stat.
He'd dip below by just 0.2% if we didn't win the 13th.
The whole thing was just a complete waste of time. I'll be surprised if I ever see a manager so welded to a formation and a style of play that his squad are so ill suited to again. I do get what he was trying to do, there's a reason Carrick has gone back to more counter attacking football, and we probably do need to break away from that eventually to get back competing at the very top, but the way he went about it just wasn't right.
However to be honest it's the people above him's fault for hiring him in the first place too.
However to be honest it's the people above him's fault for hiring him in the first place too.
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People conveniently skip over the fact he was imported by the board into a club with traditions and players alien to his formation and style of play to implement. He was doing exactly what he was brought in to do. Its the board that should get all blame for hiring him to do a job then expecting him to do the opposite of what he was hired for.
In that run after October from manager of the month to him getting the boot there were at least 4 or 5 games where Utd should have got more pts that would have added another 10 to 12 pts and Utd would have been right up there.
It was a shocking run of games and he was rightfully sacked on the back of it.
3 wins, 2 losses, 5 draws.
1-0 win v Newcastle
2-1 win vs Palace
4-1 win vs Wolves
1-0 Loss to 10 man Everton
2-1 Loss to Villa
2-2 Spurs - winning/losing - scraped a draw
2-2 Forest - winning/losing - scraped a draw
1-1 West Ham - winning & draw
1-1 Wolves - - winning & draw
4-4 Bournemouth -winning/losing/winning/draw
i point out the weakness of just using results as the metric to evaluate overall performance, and you proceed to continue to bang on about... results. yes, i get it. results were poor. but a few of us clearly had more stomach for them because we could see what the intention was, the attempt to implement a specific system that the players needed to learn. a lot of them struggled with it, others were getting there slowly. there were other obvious players we needed, particularly in midfield as I've said. Carrick has improved results because he's primarily simplified things for the players. according to everyone here who only cares about results, that's a good thing, for those of us more interested in actually winning titles, we see a potential regression back to the mistakes of the past.
i hope Carrick proves me wrong next year, and can actually improve performances, because, again, the results so far are simply not sustainable if we maintain this kind of performance. which is why using results only, devoid of context, is a pretty simplistic way of viewing things.
a system coach like Amorim puts the system first, and it's up to the players to adapt and learn it. a coach like Carrick will take the more pragmatic approach and focus on the strengths of the players at his disposal. you can see why the latter would produce better short term results than the former. whether it translates into league titles is the bigger question. hopefully this year was just Carrick doing what he needed to do as an interim, and we see things evolve next year.
This is just a strange take for me because we had many more atrocious performances under Amorim than we’ve had under Carrick. It never looked like we were building anything sustainable because there were fundamental issues with his system which he just refused to adapt for the league. It was high risk, low reward transition football which never showed any consistency. Our centre backs averaged more touches than our midfielders, which has thankfully now changed under Carrick. After spending £200 million on attackers we showed some improvement in attacking metrics but it came at the cost of our midfield and defence always looking vulnerable. His in game management was also awful with opposition managers consistently outthinking him and getting the better of second halves. We became an easy team to play against and get points against, and that is not a stable foundation for building a title challenge.
Also, how long did he need to implement this system? He had 14 months and we were still putting in terrible performances against relegation fodder. If a coach can’t make his system effective in that time frame then he’s either not a good enough coach or it’s not a good enough system. Which again, is a terrible foundation for challenging for titles.
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'Successful' is subjective.
Will he ever manage a big club again....I doubt it.
All the managers who managed us since SAF have gone on to do nothing big, except for Mourinho, who I think did win trophies after leaving us, and is now managing Real Madrid.
Who does Ole manage?
Who does ETH manage?
Who does LVG manage?
Are they managers anymore?
I think these people, including Ruben, have failed so spectacularly that no big club will touch them until they prove themselves....which I am not sure is possible, given that these managers aren't particularly good.
That is insane!
How can Amorim supporters still say anything positive about him?
He was probably the worst manager in the EPL, during his time with us.
He could easily get a mid-table team relegated.
It's funny because you're talking about a manager who managed us around 100 years ago, and your sole measurement for determining who was the best manager is win percentage. Not only is it funny, it's actually bizarre that you genuinely think like this. No other variables at all, no questions asked, just straight up win percentage. How good was our team? How was the league? How good were the opponents? What was our playstyle? What made the manager good at the time? How was his tactical understanding? I mean, you haven't even thought to think of basic questions like these. With your line of thinking, then Zidane is a better manager than Alex Ferguson.
Do you really believe that a manager from the 1920/30 is better than Amorim because he had a better win percentage?
Didn't he say Amorim had a better win percentage then those managers?It's funny because you're talking about a manager who managed us around 100 years ago, and your sole measurement for determining who was the best manager is win percentage. Not only is it funny, it's actually bizarre that you genuinely think like this. No other variables at all, no questions asked, just straight up win percentage. How good was our team? How was the league? How good were the opponents? What was our playstyle? What made the manager good at the time? How was his tactical understanding? I mean, you haven't even thought to think of basic questions like these. With your line of thinking, then Zidane is a better manager than Alex Ferguson.
Do you really believe that a manager from the 1920/30 is better than Amorim because he had a better win percentage?
You do realise that nitpicking this point makes absolutely no difference to whether Amorim was generationally shite or not, right? It's just a waste of time. And by the way, he was.It's funny because you're talking about a manager who managed us around 100 years ago, and your sole measurement for determining who was the best manager is win percentage. Not only is it funny, it's actually bizarre that you genuinely think like this. No other variables at all, no questions asked, just straight up win percentage. How good was our team? How was the league? How good were the opponents? What was our playstyle? What made the manager good at the time? How was his tactical understanding? I mean, you haven't even thought to think of basic questions like these. With your line of thinking, then Zidane is a better manager than Alex Ferguson.
Do you really believe that a manager from the 1920/30 is better than Amorim because he had a better win percentage?
Amorim wasn't that bad: "Here are some stats that tells one thing"
Amorim was bad: "Here are some stats and results that tells one thing"
Amorim wasn't that bad: "Smiley face haha, that's funny, look at you using some stats"
The bad faith interpretation and lack of self awareness is incredible. Almost as arrogant and ridiculously bad as Amorim himself, which makes sense. If you feel the need to defend or 'provide context' for such an objectively bad manager, you need to have the same delusion.
Well said. The man was a coward and cowards don’t win
If you're not interested in providing context to football related discussions, what are you even doing here?
Edit; Right, you're the guy that called him cancer. Makes sense now.
Discussing him or anything else on this forum makes absolutely no difference to anything, so why bother? It's a forum. It's supposed to be a "waste of time."
It's remarkable to me that people would even entertain the idea of a manager with a 38% win rate ever winning a league title.
It's also remarkable that these same people would question the sustainability of another manager's results when the one with a 38% win rate could not even reach a point where such a topic could be discussed.
It's also remarkable that these same people would question the sustainability of another manager's results when the one with a 38% win rate could not even reach a point where such a topic could be discussed.
It is ridiculous. And then be offended when called out on it.
One thing I know: Carrick won‘t fall to the depths of Amorim‘s incompetence.
He wasn't hired to win 38% of his matches. Simply not having the worst win percentage in 50 years would hardly count as the opposite of what he was hired to do.
I wish people would stop acting like they know exactly why he was brought in. It’s pretty clear that even he himself never expected things to get that bad. They were desperate to bring him in asap because they thought he could at least somewhat salvage the season. From the very beginning he kept talking about how time needs to be earned. Losing a record number of games and barely winning any of them was never part of some master plan.
The board should be blamed for hiring him, and he should be blamed for doing a terrible job and doing nothing to get the best out of the squad he had. It’s that simple.
I don't understand what this weird fanaticism is with defending previous managers to the ends of the earth. How can anyone defend Amorim, just look at his record.
I feel like when Sir Alex gave the speech to support the next manager, that some fans have clung to that as gospel. That and people like to be contrarian just for the sake of creating arguments.
I feel like when Sir Alex gave the speech to support the next manager, that some fans have clung to that as gospel. That and people like to be contrarian just for the sake of creating arguments.
You have fans in this very forum defending Greenwood and wanting him back. I would say that is significantly worse than fans defending Amorim. He was just poor, not some evil human being.
It's funny because you're talking about a manager who managed us around 100 years ago, and your sole measurement for determining who was the best manager is win percentage. Not only is it funny, it's actually bizarre that you genuinely think like this. No other variables at all, no questions asked, just straight up win percentage. How good was our team? How was the league? How good were the opponents? What was our playstyle? What made the manager good at the time? How was his tactical understanding? I mean, you haven't even thought to think of basic questions like these. With your line of thinking, then Zidane is a better manager than Alex Ferguson.
Do you really believe that a manager from the 1920/30 is better than Amorim because he had a better win percentage?
1) easily good enough for third, despite Amorim never getting us that high in the table.
2) the league was very open this year, which gave us a great opportunity to get into the top four. Amorim never managed that despite us having numerous winnable opportunities.
3) too often they were better than us, finding it too easy to find ways to beat us.
4) our play style was poor. We’d pass it between our centre backs and then knock it into the channels hoping to play off the press and transitions. This left us wide open in the middle for opposition runners which kept hurting us and costing us points. We’d often have players like Dalot in more dangerous positions around the opposition box rather than Bruno. We never tried to build through the midfield with shorter passing combinations.
5) pretty stumped on this one. He helped get rid of Garnacho which was good.
6) his tactical understanding was poor, and poorly suited to the league. He was regularly exposed by opposition managers, especially after they made half time changes.
But also all this talk about underlying stats. Even in this cherry picked scenario they aren't even much better. At best overall similar to the "unsustainable" football as of now. That's without going into some of the takes that are pure fan fiction, like us "playing the best football in the league at the time he was sacked".
You responded to my question to the poster about the league and our team back in 1920/30. I know very well the league and our team this season, thanks.