The only reason to persist with Ruben Amorim after his first few months was to give him a proper pre-season. But Manchester United have failed to deliver.
When Ruben Amorim returned to Carrington on Friday morning he must have wondered whether his pre-summer parting message for Manchester United “to be really strong and to be brave” had been lost in translation.
The deadwood he cut adrift had washed back ashore. The new signings he was promised were not yet delivered. The dumpster fire he abandoned was still raging.
By the most crucial juncture of perhaps the biggest summer transfer window in Manchester United history, five players known to have no future at the club were officially transfer-listed and one release clause was activated.
It is impossible to think this was the “clear picture” Amorim referenced at the end of May, or that he feels this is the best way to “use every minute in every week of pre-season”.
With players reporting for duty on Monday morning, Manchester United are working against the clock and wasting precious time.
Amorim has discussed the importance of pre-season before, the specific lack of which he felt contributed to last season’s struggles.
“I want them to know me in the different ways and not always preparing the match, with stress!” he said in January. “Spending three weeks together, creating something and then you want to create something where you know the players. We do not have the time to do.
“I think that is the secret of teams, even when you have the best players and that feeling, it is really hard to win and I wanted to build something like that here. But we need time for that.”
It is time his employers are already eating into. Matheus Cunha was a fine addition but a straightforward capture even the Ratcliffe brains trust could not bungle, while a predictable inability to sell has hampered any further movement.
Beyond that, deadlines have been set and passed to sign Bryan Mbeumo, with either possible outcome making Manchester United look varying degrees of foolish: if they do not set an overdue precedent by walking away from a deal they feel has been inflated, they must instead meet demands which were never going to be lowered.
Omar Berrada pledged last month to “do our best to do more signings quickly” but the immediate backtrack – “sometimes when you’re not quick it’s because you’re negotiating and you’re trying to make sure you get the right value for money” – was revealing; Manchester United almost always find the unfathomable third option of taking too long to wrap up signings which become too expensive.
The argument to remain patient with Amorim hinged on him needing a pre-season, and the Portuguese having time and space to work on integrating the players he wants into his fabled system. It was the only reason to persevere with an idea which turned out to be atrocious in practice last season.
That argument collapses in on itself the longer he is given the same squad he has already failed spectacularly with, unless the belief is that Jonny Evans, Christian Eriksen and Victor Lindelof were the bad apples causing everything else to rot.
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A few months of acclimatisation might do wonders for Patrick Dorgu’s confidence and capability levels. Diego Leon could hit the ground running as a teenager playing and living outside of Paraguay for the first time in his life. There may happen to be some ludicrously talented wing-backs, centre-forwards, goalkeepers and holding midfielders in the Academy waiting to emerge.
But Manchester United cannot afford much in their current state, let alone relying on possibilities, suppositions and estimations.
They need guarantees and certainties, absolutes and assurances. That is why the return of an old transfer policy made complete sense in early June but the longer the current situation drags into July, the more impeded Amorim’s start – already far further back than first anticipated – will be.
Cunha alone cannot hope to galvanise and refresh this group with his mere presence. The spectres of Rashford, Garnacho, Sancho and Antony still linger. The sense that Manchester United are entirely incapable of negotiating more than one transfer at a time persists.
Making Mbeumo a priority target is one thing but other opportunities are going unexplored. The instinct might be to raise an eyebrow at the reported pursuit of Dominic Calvert-Lewin but a free agent with substantial experience and no settling-in period in a position Manchester United must reinforce at least makes sense without being particularly inspiring.
Yet not every signing needs to come with a statement, not every purchase must send a message. Sensible squad building requires far more cost-effective deals than it does extravagant ones, even if they cannot feed the ego quite as emphatically.
And that ego will almost certainly need to take a hit over the valuation of the players they openly wish and need to sell before buying. As Berrada put it, there is a need to “balance the books”.
But he also said “we’ve put ourselves in the best position possible by doing everything that we’ve had this year around cost-cutting,” and the only way to make such a risible defence of widespread redundancies and ludicrous cutbacks more shameful is to squander that apparent place of strength.
“I’m confident that we will come out of the window with a much stronger team than what we’ve gone into,” he added, and they might well do. But the point was only ever to give Amorim a stronger team to work with to maximise his “secret” weapon of pre-season.
Manchester United have failed on that count already. Their first friendly is in 12 days before they fly out to the United States for a tournament which bleeds into August. Every minute ticking away with neither a signing nor a sale feels like part of the countdown to Amorim’s demise rather than the start of his great rebuild.
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