You have to feel for Ruben Amorim. Parachuted into the seething mess of Manchester United’s 2024/25 season, and with only a disjointed group of malcontents to work with, the Portuguese’s start to life at Old Trafford was traumatic.
The campaign was deemed a write-off with months still to play while the club crawled towards a summer rebuild which is yet to get off the ground, despite an early flicker of promise in the timely capture of Matheus Cunha.
The Brazilian was the perfect signing for Amorim’s bright new future, a combative, creative and entertaining player who, crucially, knows the Premier League and knows a 3-4-2-1 system.
The manager can be forgiven for feeling frustrated that more signings haven’t followed, and that some of the dreck clogging up his wage bill is still hanging around.
But if the club’s transfer inactivity is an irritant, their decision not to have academy sides replicate the first team’s style of play is pure toxicity.
Missing the point
Despite what accountants and pure profiteers would have you believe, the role of a football club’s academy is almost overwhelmingly simple. Sit down for this one – it’s to provide players to the first team who can make it better.
Perhaps it’s worth zooming out slightly to frame this idea more clearly. A football club, and certainly one as large and storied as Manchester United, exists to play – and win – football matches. If they do that enough times, they win silverware. Then they repeat it as often as they can.
The only trophies that matter are those delivered by the first team, so it should not be controversial to state that everything below the first team should be working together to give it the best possible shot at winning.
But the latest Jason Wilcox diktat, that United’s youth sides should “focus on bringing through quality talent rather than replicate the exact first-team set-up”, utterly undermines this, practically and ideologically.
Barcelona’s tiki-taka DNA runs through the entire club. Pep Guardiola can pick a total footballing teenager out of Manchester City’s academy at will. Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool could draft a youngster in to slot unthinkingly into the gegenpress.
Amorim’s United, it seems, is only surface deep if it exists at all. Scratch below the first team and it’s Wilcox’s United, operating at odds to the first-team coach. That’s the United that will be here when the Portuguese leaves and the club inevitably snaps back to a more conventional tactician – if there’s no success, Amorim’s tenure will have been nothing more than the latest grotesque charade at Old Trafford, with the manager hung out to dry once more.
An exercise in self-defeat
When selecting the charismatic 40-year-old to replace Erik ten Hag, the United hierarchy opted for perhaps the most tactically intransigent manager in Europe.
This was a precocious talent whose 3-4-2-1 system had rescued Sporting CP from the doldrums and delivered them a league title and who, apparently, would rather eat his own fingers than move to a back four. By all accounts this was made abundantly clear to INEOS and co. during the interview stage, and has been viscerally hammered home to fans via the medium of live performance.
It was also very quickly impressed on the players, many of whom seemed utterly dumbfounded by the concept of playing a different formation – that they took so long to adapt is baffling.
The intention always seemed to be a kind of sink-or-swim process for the rest of the season, to be rectified by a busy transfer window and supplemented by close inspection of the academy.
By now, that academy should be a hotbed of wing-back development, but instead players who have spent their whole fledgling footballing careers playing 4-3-3 taking the massive step up to first-team action face the extra hurdle of having to learn an entirely new system.
The kids aren’t alright
And it’s not all about the manager – spare a thought for the kids. If we suspend disbelief and imagine Amorim building a small dynasty at Old Trafford, making the role of United boss his own for a decade or more, countless academy products will have brushes with the first team.
Under Wilcox’s Two-System System players can spend their formative years impressing in a role which simply doesn’t exist higher up, landing them at the top but without a natural position.
It’s very early to judge but Harry Amass looks like a case in point, a good full-back in a back four but without the attacking abilities to be a wing-back or the defensive solidity to be a wide centre-back.
Pouring time, money and resource into training youngsters who do not fit the first-team seems like a ridiculous waste until the situation is turned on its head – most managers prefer a back four, and most academy products won’t make it at United, so why not make them saleable?
It’s not a pretty thought, but certainly one which has been carefully considered in the boardroom, and should the Amorim era come to a premature end a more traditional manager can be wheeled in with minimal fuss, revealing this decision for what it is – a vote of no confidence in the most important man at the club.
INEOS are businessmen, and by not providing a smooth pathway from academy to first-team they are implicitly telling Amorim and every young player at the club that they’ve crunched the numbers and the likelihood is that 3-4-2-1 is not sticking around long enough for them to invest in it.
Featured image Jan Kruger via Getty Images
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Joe Ponting
Joe has spent more than half his life writing about football and all of it following United. As a child he told a doctor his name was ‘Paul Scholes’, but could never pick a pass like him no matter how much he tried.
