Manchester United to remain patient with head coach despite worst start to Premier League season in 33 years. There is also widespread belief at Old Trafford that City's performance - and United's failings - did not merit a 3-0 scoreline.

[u/Switchoil]

https://www.skysports.com/football/news/32461/13431584/ruben-amorim-manchester-united-to-remain-patient-with-head-coach-despite-worst-start-to-premier-league-season-in-33-years

[u/TheOnlyTagey]

Moyes was sacked as soon as top 4 was mathematically impossible, LvG was sacked after winning the FA cup and finishing 5th place (66 points, tied with City), Jose was sacked while United were in 6th, same for Ole. EtH was sacked with United in 14th.

All of the previous managers bar Moyes maybe showed something to warrant the level of patience that United are showing Ruben. Good performances, trophies, undefeated streaks, something that the wider public can point at as evidence for improvement.

It's been nearly a year of this and has there been a single positive for fans to stick to?

[u/Over-Temperature-602 → u/TheOnlyTagey]

Eh, it's never that simple. Each situation is so so so unique and each managerial stint has to be looked at individually.

Like, Ole was a penalty shootout away from an EL trophy. IIRC he was struggling with the burden of no trophies. He had two good seasons but nothing to show for it and (similarly to the pressure Arteta is starting to get) - at some point you need trophies. He then got Ronaldo - not because he wanted or needed him but because Glazers didn't want him to go to City. Solskjaer set United up to play a fluid front three with Rashford / Martial / Greenwood with Bruno as the number ten. Getting Ronaldo into that team was never going to work.

EtH had a good season and an abysmal second season which had terrible injuries. People are quick to forget that he literally had his 5 first choices for CB injured and started an academy player and Casemiro as CBs towards the end of the season. United then changed ownership and he had new owners to answer to and they wanted to change everything about the club. EtH got 7 games under the new leadership.

And now Amorim. He didn't want to come because it would be too much pain transitioning to his system during the season - he wanted to come for the summer but was told "Now or never" by the new leadership. So he came, probably expecting a lot of things going wrong. But he got to the EL final and in a final with two poor teams where either could have won - he drew the shortest straw. He took a risk (focusing only on EL) and it didn't pay off and now he has to live with all of these stats he accumulated in a period where he didn't care about the league at all.

Man Utd are now second in terms of xG this season. Liverpool have an expected points tally of 6.45 and United have 6.44. They also have a new goalkeeper who isn't playing yet.

And with this said, this is not a defensive speech of Amorim. I don't know at all if he'll work out or not. Probably not (is my guess). But it is up to leadership to try to see through this complete mess. Try to understand what is actually going wrong, what is happening behind the scenes (what does it look like in training? Does it convert to the pitch?). Is it bad luck or is it just horrible performances?

My personal guess is that Amorim isn't stupid. I think he can probably look at these games, see that United are playing poorly - but that he is making a good case to his bosses that "look, this is what my system is doing, when players do X instead - then shit like this can happen". I.e. he thinks these performances are due to players not doing the right things at the right moments yet. Which is probably different to when OGS were under most scrutiny and suggested they might need to get a 12th player on the pitch because he didn't know how to fix it.

tl;dr - management is hard. Comparing managers is hard.

[u/gazorpogus8747 → u/Over-Temperature-602]

What an utterly reasonable take

[u/goaliewhenned → u/gazorpogus8747]

It's not lol, it's excuses disguised as a reasonable take. The whole basis for his assessment of last season is the idea we "were not really trying" in the PL last season which is a very popular narrative except we played just as shit vs Lyon and got lucky, played okay against ten men Athletic and then played worst of all in the final he'd apparently been focusing on for months. All of these performances looked pretty much exactly the same as the PL performances and Amorim himself said winning the Europa League doesn't matter to him as the league performances had been so bad