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Manchester United fans are real giddy, aren’t they? They are very excited indeed about Ruben Amorim. And you know what? So are we. There is perhaps no other manager around we’ve been more keen to see have a go at sorting out any of the sillier big clubs knocking around the Barclays currently.
So we get it, we really do. But United have been here before so very many times in their post-Fergie doldrums. So many managers, so much ‘this time we’ve nailed it’ confidence that turned out time and time again to be absolute delusion.
So where does Amorim rank on the New Man United Manager Giddiness Index? We won’t go too deeply into the enormously complex science behind the NMUMGI, but suffice to say it requires eight supercomputers, 27 clipboard-wielding, white-coated boffins and enough AI power to light Paris for 18 months to crunch all the numbers and produce this list. So you know these rankings are rock solid and in absolutely no way just plucked entirely from our arse. 10) David Moyes, July 2013 Weren’t sure, were they? And quite right too.
The most obvious – yet not only – example of Sir Alex Ferguson’s villain arc in the story of United’s decline after his exit. His ordaining of Moyes as The Chosen One left United fans little choice but to fall in line despite their entirely justified misgivings about entrusting such a huge job to a man who had done Quite Well at Everton rather than bringing in another elite supercoach. In truth, it may well be that nobody could have followed Fergie.
Such was his vice-like stranglehold of the Barclays that he could, and did, win it with a mediocre team. He didn’t quite salt the earth before leaving the hotseat, but nor did he leave his inevitably mortal replacement a great deal to work with. Go and look at that last squad with which Fergie won the title and tell me any other manager has them as anything more than top-four contenders.
He was a ridiculous manager, and part of just how ridiculous is clear in just how impossible a job he left for anyone else. He built a couple of all-time great teams , but didn’t leave anything like that for the successor he damned with his own approval. Moyes did not last even one season.
READ: David Moyes managed Manchester United once and it is time we all just moved on 9) Michael Carrick, November 2021 One of the most cerebral of key Fergie lieutenants and by this time an established touchline figure at Old Trafford, but there wasn’t any great groundswell to hand him the reins on a long-term basis, which does at least point to lessons having been learned. 8) Ralf Rangnick, December 2021 Perhaps the height of United’s post-Fergie delusions rests with the shoulder-shrugging ambivalence that greeted the arrival of one of the most influential coaching figures of his generation. Although, to be fair, that response mainly came from the squad itself.
The fans by this point were too damaged to care much either way and just wanted the season to end. 7) Jose Mourinho, May 2016 Can one be tentatively giddy? Feels like the arrival of Mourinho back in 2016 prompted that emotion. United fans had by this stage been burned by a couple of years of Van Gaal’s sterile domination of games.
The football had been, at times, utterly turgid. But this was the point at which doubts over Mourinho had just started to surface. While it would be during his Old Trafford reign that he would complete his full descent into caricature, becoming more meme than man, the process was already underway after the manner in which his second spell at Chelsea had imploded.
Having won the 2014/15 Premier League title after returning to Chelsea, he had gone full Third-Season Mourinho in 2015/16, and was sacked four months after signing a new contract with the champions having inexplicably lost nine of their first 16 games of what would turn out to be the most batsh*t Premier League season since records began. It all meant any giddiness at the appointment of a man who was at that time still unquestionably regarded as an elite and thus United-suitable manager had to be tempered by the gnawing knowledge that he might very well be losing connection with the plot. READ: Mourinho was right at Man Utd (but also a d*ck) 6) Ryan Giggs, April 2014 That first post-Ferg season in 2013/14 really did establish all manner of tropes and traditions that have now been in place for more than a decade.
A manager failing to produce that Fergie alchemy is replaced temporarily in the hotseat by a key figure from that era of greatness in the hope something rubbed off on them. United gave it Giggsy ‘til end of the season, as a whole generation of United fans discovered what supporting a normal club was like. Turns out United weren’t ‘different’ when it came to backing the manager.
They just happened to have employed the best one there has ever been for over a quarter of a century. 5) Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, December 2018 Unless you support a club that has been the victim of late-era Mourinho gaslighting and misery, it really is hard to explain just how soul-sapping and wearying it all is. He’s just such a mood-hoover once things start to go wrong.
Non-United fans will perhaps never understand how it felt to have someone who seemed to actively hate the club replaced by a man who would run through brick walls for it. Solskjaer was, in every way, a less problematic version of Giggs. A Fergie-era legend who knew what United was all about.
Sure, he was wildly unqualified as a manager to be in charge, but by now United had tried two very different but very decorated elite managers and it hadn’t worked at all. Time for someone who Knew The Club and, perhaps even more importantly, didn’t appear to hate everything about it. The giddiness levels grew to uncontrollable levels during what really should only ever have been an interim spell as manager.
That was the mistake United made with Solskjaer that they avoided with your Giggses, your Carricks and now with the Van Nistelrooys of this world. You don’t make the entirely unqualified club legend who has given the place a much-needed short-term lift the permanent manager. That’s a stupid thing to do.
But when you’re on the Mourinho rebound, stupid decisions are perhaps inevitable and certainly at the very least understandable. 4) Ruud van Nistelrooy, October 2024 Based on the way Old Trafford has been absolutely jumping in recent games we have to conclude that either Van Nistelrooy is even more beloved than Solskjaer was or – perhaps even crazier still – Ten Hag had in his own more passive way sucked more life out of the club than even the Dark Lord himself Jose Mourinho. The more balanced explanation is perhaps the knowledge that this was only ever short-term and was leading into a proper new manager about whom they are very, very giddy indeed.
READ: Five PL moves for Ruud van Nistelrooy post-Man Utd include replacing Ange Postecoglou at Spurs 3) Erik Ten Hag, May 2022 The memories of that enormously fun 2018/19 Ajax side were still fresh enough for Ten Hag’s arrival at Old Trafford to represent something significant. In fairness to the fans, how were they supposed to know at this point that Ten Hag had already decided it would be impossible to recreate the brilliantly entertaining football that Ajax team had played now he only had the resources of Manchester United at his disposal? At the time, it really did seem like a fine appointment and giddiness was understandable. United were by now long past the point of being all-conquering dominators.
They now needed to punch above their (still considerable) weight to compete with Man City and Liverpool, so who better than a coach who had so wonderfully demonstrated such an ability on that giant-bothering Champions League run that only came unstuck against the clearly unstoppable force of Lucas Moura? Turns out the answer to that might have been ‘literally anyone’ but at the time it really did seem like a good idea, as failed managerial appointments so often do. Not every disaster is a David Moyes, basically. 2) Louis van Gaal, July 2014 It went miserably wrong due to misery-inducing football, but the initial reaction was pretty giddy.
This was a manager far more in line with how United fans very understandably saw themselves after the absurd era of success they’d just lived through. Here was the globally-respected, trophy-hoarding super-manager with the requisite CV to continue Ferguson’s work. A Champions League winner at Ajax who had gone on to manage Barcelona, Netherlands and Bayern Munich was much more the right sort of thing than a former Port Vale manager whose greatest accomplishment in management was finishing fourth once.
Van Gaal was the man to get United back on track and back where they belonged, surely. They had to let him go in the end, he was rubbish. 1) Ruben Amorim, November 2024 United fans are definitely ready to get hurt again.
They are so giddy. They are so correctly giddy. We get it; we’ve not been this excited ourselves about a Premier League managerial appointment for quite some time.
The sheer range of outcomes here is so tantalisingly vast. Amorim has the charisma of a young Mourinho and has done enough in a short managerial career to date to suggest he is something very special indeed. He is a United manager who absolutely could build something magnificent given the time and assistance required.
It could absolutely be magnificent. He could also fall completely flat on his face when faced with the task of introducing a very specific and high-demand style of football to a squad that appears at best half-suited to it. Such is the wave of optimism and goodwill that we fully expect Amorim to at least initially continue the improved form of the Van Nistelrooy interregnum, but how he and United and the fans cope with the inevitable bumps in the road that come with what remains an absolutely vast rebuild job is going to be one of the most compelling upcoming Barclays storylines.
Becoming Manchester United manager in the post-Fergie years never works. These people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might but..
. it might work for Amorim. READ NEXT: Ruben Amorim already above Mikel Arteta in Premier League manager rankings.
