It’s tough to hire a new Manchester United manager. It has become an impossible job to fill the impossible job, and for the seventh time since Sir Alex Ferguson retired in May 2013, the Premier League’s biggest club is in the market for a new coach following Ruben Amorim’s dismissal on Monday morning.
They say this inside Old Trafford every time the manager’s office is cleared out for a new appointment, but they really need to get it right this time.
United must go big. It is time for one of the most powerful clubs in the world to hire a manager who has the experience, the track record, Premier League credentials and the personality to make managing the club seem like a privilege rather than a burden.
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Whether they are prepared to wait for a manager like Thomas Tuchel, Mauricio Pochettino or Carlo Ancelotti until after the World Cup, or instead gamble now on someone like Oliver Glasner, Kieran McKenna or Gareth Southgate remains to be seen. Sources have told ESPN that, right now, there is no clear plan of whether to appoint a new manager quickly, or play the long game and leave Darren Fletcher in interim charge until the summer.
But the mistakes of the past and the lessons learned from the failed appointments of David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Erik ten Hag and Amorim must now lead United to a manager/coach who can do what each of those were unable, or ill-equipped, to do: handle the pressure, play exciting football and, most importantly, win.
“When you consider each of the managers we appointed post-Sir Alex, they all had some kind of personality flaw,” a United source told ESPN. “They were either too cautious, too inflexible, too combative or simply not up to it, but if you rolled them all into one, you might end up with somebody who ticked all the boxes.”
1:25
Was the Man United job ‘too big’ for Ruben Amorim?
Julien Laurens explains what went wrong for Ruben Amorim at Manchester United after being sacked following 14 months at the club.
Amorim, just 39 years old when Man United recruited him from Sporting CP in November 2024, was the rising star in European coaching at the time. He had charisma, confidence, a winning track record and it was a coup for United to tempt him to Old Trafford. He had guided Sporting to two domestic titles, breaking the Benfica-Porto stranglehold on the Portuguese game in doing so, and had been high on the lists of Liverpool and Barcelona during their own search for a new coach less than six months earlier.
But despite all of the positives that appeared to come with the Amorim appointment, he quickly proved to be out of his depth. Sources have told ESPN that Amorim was “too stubborn and too immature” to cope with the demands of the job, and having told the club he would be “flexible” and “evolve” his favored 3-4-3 formation, ultimately refused to be more pragmatic until it was too late.
So after just 14 months, the “next big thing” has ended up on the United scrapheap like the rest of his post-Ferguson predecessors. And once again, United have paid the price for hiring a coach who just didn’t have the credentials for the job.
One source has told ESPN that United is an “extrovert club managed by introverts” and from the perspective of the man sat in the dugout, it is a valid observation. Amorim and Ten Hag both struggled with the weight of the job, bristling repeatedly at the noise generated by legendary former players, including Gary Neville, Paul Scholes and Roy Keane, now employed as high-profile pundits.
Solskjaer was less thin-skinned, but he lacked the presence and personality of a top club manager. Moyes, who lasted just 10 months in charge as Ferguson’s hand-picked successor, was over-sensitive to criticism and too inhibited by his role to have any hope of excelling.
Van Gaal steadied the ship after Moyes, but like Amorim, he lost the faith of the players, fans and his bosses by proving too wedded to a negative, unattractive style of play that brought limited results. It was only Mourinho, hired to replace Van Gaal in 2016, who had the credentials to be a United manager, but unfortunately for the club, the self-styled Special One was no longer special when he arrived at Old Trafford. Right guy, just five years too late.
3:04
Who could become Amorim’s successor at Manchester United?
Gab Marcotti and Julien Laurens assess the managerial options available for Manchester United after sacking Ruben Amorim.
Sources have told ESPN that senior figures at United had recommended Pochettino for the job in 2016 only for the Glazer family, the club’s majority owners, to pick Mourinho because of his track record and personality. The Glazers will definitely give input this time, with co-chairman Joel Glazer having his say alongside minority owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, CEO Omar Berrada and director of football Jason Wilcox.
The big question is which direction that group will take. Will it be a head coach working in tandem with the director of football, or a more traditional manager with the authority to lead the team and the club?
Ferguson would often say that the biggest personality at any club had to be the manager and that is even more the case at United. It is an alpha football club, but with nobody fitting that description in the manager’s office or above him. And that’s what United need now: somebody with the ego and the credentials to handle the noise, the former players and the demand for results and stylish football.
Nobody has done that since Ferguson, and the time is now for that to change.
