'Ruben Amorim's success at Man Utd doesn't depend on him - lessons have to be learned'
"There’s a pretty good chance that if the Glazer family or Sir Jim Ratcliffe owned the club when Busby and Ferguson were in their pomp they wouldn’t have survived to build their dynasties."
by Robbie Fowler · The MirrorOnly three managers have ever won the championship for Manchester United.
Ernest Magnall was the first to do it, twice guiding United to the old Football League first division title in the space of four seasons at the start of the 20th century. Forty-one years after the second of Magnall’s successes in 1911, the great Sir Matt Busby won the first of his five championships.
When Sir Alex Ferguson won the first Premier League title for United in 1993, the great man went on to lift the trophy on another 12 occasions, living up to his promise to knock Liverpool off their perch. United have 20 titles, Liverpool 19.
Unless Ruben Amorim really is the next Special One to come to England from Portugal, the likelihood is that the Old Trafford club’s haul will eventually be matched by their great rivals from the opposite end of the East Lancs Road.
The reason I’ve name-checked Magnall, Busby and Ferguson is because all three men were given a commodity that appears to be in short supply at United in the modern era: time.
It took Magnall five years to make United champions for the first time in their history in 1908 - and even then it’s fair to say he was given a huge helping hand by an FA ruling that forced rivals Manchester City to sell their entire squad as punishment for financial irregularities.
Magnall signed Billy Meredith, Sandy Turnbull, Herbert Burgess and Jimmy Bannister - and the title was duly won in their first full season at the club. Busby became United boss in 1945 after he had been demobbed at the end of World War Two. His United team didn’t win the first division until 1951.
Ferguson, the greatest of them all, needed six-and-a-half seasons to build a championship team after arriving at Old Trafford from Aberdeen in November 1986. Now of course, the pressures of football management have changed over the course of the last 100 years, but any football fan old enough to remember will recall how close Ferguson was to being sacked in 1990. So it’s not as if pressure on the manager is a new phenomenon at Manchester United.
There’s a pretty good chance that if the Glazer family or Sir Jim Ratcliffe owned the club when Busby and Ferguson were in their pomp they wouldn’t have survived to build their dynasties.
Amorim is the sixth permanent manager to be tasked with bringing back the glory years since Sir Alex retired. United have still won trophies in the intervening period - two FA Cups, two League Cups and the Europa League - yet David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Erik ten Hag have all run out of time.
The average tenure for a United manager in the last 11 years has been 783 days - and that includes the three months Solskjaer was given as interim boss after replacing Mourinho. Two years is ample time for a coach to put their fingerprint on any team, of course, but to develop a squad that is going to deliver sustained success takes longer.
But it requires everyone at the club singing from the same hymn sheet. Even from the outside, it’s clear to see that there has been no joined-up thinking since Ferguson departed Old Trafford alongside chief executive David Gill.
Amorim needs to hit the ground running. I am a big admirer of the Portuguese and what he achieved at Sporting Lisbon. At the age of 39, he will bring a hunger and intensity to the manager’s office. I think it is a good fit. Given he has arrived in Manchester with United sitting 13th in the table, it is unrealistic to think that he can challenge City, Liverpool or Arsenal for the title - or even finishing in the top four.
But he proved to be very adept at winning knock-out tournaments in his early years as a coach - and perhaps the Europa League does offer him an opportunity to take United back into the Champions League. Results, as always, will make or break Amorim. But what he needs to develop first of all is a Manchester United identity.
Amorim has joined a club that has forgotten who it is. The cost of appointing so many managers has seen over £1.5billion burned in the transfer market and a group of players who have been recruited without an underlying plan being in place.
Changes have been made in the way United recruit their players since Ratcliffe arrived to great fanfare almost a year ago. It isn’t just Amorim who has something to prove in the coming weeks, months and, just maybe, years.
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