Manchester United defender Matthijs de Ligt has revealed he has a “really good relationship” with Ruben Amorim and agrees with the Portuguese coach’s assessment that no European football next season will benefit the team.
De Ligt, 25, joined the Red Devils last summer from Bayern Munich in a deal worth a potential £42 million. Moroccan fullback Noussair Mazraoui also swapped Bavaria for Manchester at the same time as Erik ten Hag targeted two of his former pupils at Ajax in a double raid.
But while both defenders remain at United, their Dutch coach has since departed, dismissed by INEOS after a 2-0 defeat against West Ham in the Premier League in October last year.
Amorim, Sporting CP’s manager, was headhunted by chief executive Omar Berrada to replace Ten Hag and arrived in November to take the helm at Old Trafford.
But the 40-year-old coach has endured a torrid time at the Theatre of Dreams which quickly morphed into a Playhouse of Nightmares for Amorim as he oversaw the completion of United’s worst season in the Premier League era.
United were 14th in the league table when Amorim took over Ten Hag but dropped one spot to a 15th-place finish. Early exits from the FA Cup and Carabao Cup were capped off by a dismal loss in the final of the Europa League final against Tottenham Hotspur in Bilbao.
The defeat confirmed there will be no European football at Old Trafford next season – a devastating blow to the club’s revenue at a time when the financial situation is fraught.
However, there is a more optimistic counterview that less games means more time on the training pitch for Amorim to continue to mould his new squad, as former Red Devil Lee Sharpe told The Peoples Person in an exclusive interview.
Amorim has expressed this idea of no European football being an “advantage” in a recent interview.
And it’s mirrored by De Ligt, who believes it is something United can “exploit” next season while revealing he has a “really good relationship” with Amorim as the coach is “really open” with the 25-year-old defender.
“Every player wants to play as many games as possible,” De Ligt says in an interview with The Athletic.
“But I think, for the manager, there’s more time to train, more time also to have an intensive tactical session, because you can still train tactical if you play a lot of games but you cannot put the intensity in because you’re playing, every two days, a game.
“So, I think in that way, as the manager said, it could be an advantage and hopefully we can exploit that.”
In a glittering career playing for some of Europe’s behemoths, including Ajax, Juventus, and Bayern, De Ligt has only missed out on European football once before. “Well, I experienced it once. It was actually also after a Europa League final.”
The final in question? When Jose Mourinho’s United side defeated Ajax 2-0 in the 2016/17 season to lift the trophy for the first time in the club’s history. But the year after this absence, Ajax reached the Champions League semi-final under, ironically, Ten Hag, playing a blistering style of football which blew away Juventus and Real Madrid en route.
“The season after [the defeat to United], we reached the semi-final of the Champions League. So, let’s keep that. A good sign.
“On a serious note, I’ve been used to playing in the Champions League for my whole career, more or less. This season was the Europa League but it was also really nice. We reached the final and unfortunately, we couldn’t win it.”
“Next season will be different with less games,” De Ligt concludes. Fans will certainly be hoping so after a miserable campaign which brought the United faithful close to breaking point at times.
Featured image Alex Livesey via Getty Images
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Darragh Fox
Darragh is a writer for The Peoples Person who spent three years as a history graduate slowly realising football was by far the most interesting thing to write about.
