The revolving door at Old Trafford has turned again, this time swinging uncomfortably on Ruben Amorim.
When Manchester United priced him away from Sporting CP in November 2024, he arrived with the aura of a modern tactician, a coach hailed for innovation in Portugal and linked with Europe’s elite clubs.
United hoped he could be the visionary to steady their chaotic post-Ferguson years.
For a brief moment, it felt possible. His very first league win came emphatically, a 4–0 dismantling of Everton.
Weeks later, he outwitted Pep Guardiola in his first Manchester derby, winning 2–1 at the Etihad.
Those early victories sparked talk of a “new dawn,” a manager who could finally lay down a tactical identity.
Solskjaer, Mourinho, Ten Hag: The three managers sacked in the space of a week
But the light dimmed quickly.
A collapse in numbers
Since that bright start, Amorim’s reign has descended into statistics that rival the darkest days of the post-Ferguson era.
In total, he has overseen 46 matches across all competitions, producing just 18 wins, 9 draws, and 19 defeats.
His overall win rate stands at a meagre 37%, eerily similar to Ralf Rangnick’s caretaker spell, which was widely dismissed as a holding job rather than a project with ambition.
The Premier League tells an even bleaker story. Across 30 league fixtures, Amorim’s United have managed only 8 victories, alongside 15 draws and 7 defeats.
That translates to a 26.7% win rate, the kind of number more commonly associated with clubs battling relegation than with a team chasing Champions League nights.
His points return is even more damning: 31 points from 30 games, barely a single point per match.
When set against the managers he followed, Amorim’s decline comes into sharp relief.
Erik ten Hag, for instance, managed 85 Premier League matches, winning 44, drawing 14, and losing 27, which gave him an average of 1.72 points per game.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer fared even better across his 109 league games, recording 56 wins, 29 draws, and 24 losses, a record that left him with 1.81 points per match.
Louis van Gaal’s tenure was shorter but still steadier: in 76 matches, he collected 39 wins, 19 draws, and 18 defeats, averaging 1.79 points per game.
Even the much-maligned David Moyes, dismissed after less than a season, put up sturdier figures than Amorim.
In his 34 Premier League games, Moyes managed 17 wins, 6 draws, and 11 defeats, producing 1.68 points per match.
Rangnick, parachuted in as interim boss, oversaw 24 matches, winning 10, drawing 7, and losing 7, for an average of 1.54 points per game.
And Jose Mourinho, often criticised for his pragmatism, had a far superior record across 93 league matches, winning 50, drawing 26 and losing 17, which equated to 1.89 points per game.
At the top of the scale stands Sir Alex Ferguson, the eternal benchmark, whose staggering 810 league matches yielded 528 wins, 168 draws and just 114 defeats.
His average of 2.16 points per game remains the gold standard, a world away from Amorim’s limp return.
The numbers become even more unforgiving when viewed through the lens of defeats.
Ten Hag lost 31.8% of his league matches, Moyes lost 32.4 percent, Rangnick 29.2%, Van Gaal 23.7 percent, Solskjaer 22% and Mourinho only 18.3%.
Ferguson, across decades of dominance, lost a mere 14.1% of his games.
Amorim, with 19 defeats in 46 matches in all competitions, has already aligned himself far closer to Moyes and Ten Hag than to the men who managed to keep United competitive.
Defensively, too, Amorim’s record offers little respite. Under Ten Hag, United conceded 112 goals in 85 league matches, an average of 1.32 per game.
Rangnick’s side conceded 33 in 24 games, averaging 1.38.
Moyes was tighter at 1.18 goals conceded per match, Solskjaer at 1.16, Van Gaal at 0.95, Mourinho at 0.92, and Ferguson at just 0.87.
Amorim’s 30 league games have seen United ship goals at a rate perilously close to Rangnick’s, exposing a fragile defensive structure that has been punished time and again.
While Ten Hag could still point to his 146 points collected in the Premier League between 2022 and 2024, the fifth-most in that span, just one behind Aston Villa and ahead of Newcastle and Tottenham, Amorim’s return of 31 points in 30 games drags United into the statistical company of clubs who routinely flirt with relegation.
FKA/EB
Meanwhile, watch the new episode of Sports Check with Ali Jarrah below:
