Man United's Amorim running out of excuses: the numbers don't lie

Football management is ultimately a numbers game and none of them are adding up for Ruben Amorim at Manchester United.

It's a simple equation: Win more games than you lose, score more goals than you concede, and get more decisions right than you get wrong. But Amorim is failing in each of those principles right now, perhaps because he still hasn't recognized that his preferred 3-4-3 formation is only causing trouble for his struggling team.

The line from United right now is that the former Sporting CP coach still has the backing of his bosses and that it is simply a case of weathering the storm until new signings settle in and confidence returns to the squad.

But every manager is judged on results, and Amorim will be no different. Sooner or later, just as it did for predecessors Erik ten Hag, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Jose Mourinho, Louis van Gaal and David Moyes, time will run out for Amorim because he is losing too many games.

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Saturday's 3-1 defeat at Brentford was the 17th Premier League loss United have suffered during the 40-year-old's 33 games in charge -- a run that has generated just 34 points at an average of 1.03 per game. His win rate in the competition is 27.3% -- Graham Potter was fired by West Ham at the weekend with a win rate of 26% -- which makes him, by some distance, the worst United manager in the Premier League era.

David Moyes, who was fired after 10 months in charge in 2014, had previously recorded the worst Premier League win rate of any permanent manager United at 50%. Even Ralf Rangnick, who oversaw 24 games as interim manager in 2022, ended a turbulent spell in charge with 41.6%.

Amorim is off the scale in terms of his numbers, and there are no positive statistics to provide mitigation or support for him and his coaches. In his 33 league games as manager, United have scored only 39 goals and conceded 53. In all competitions, he has taken charge of 49 games, but has still lost more (21) than he has won (19) and his team have conceded as many as they has scored (95 for; 95 against).

There have also been no back-to-back wins in the Premier League, no away win since a 3-0 victory at relegated Leicester City in March, and, to add another footnote to Amorim's dismal record, United lost to a fourth-tier team for the first time in their 147-year history as League Two Grimsby Town knocked them out of the Carabao Cup last month.

So, when the United hierarchy of CEO Omar Berrada and director of football Jason Wilcox, who report to minority owner Jim Ratcliffe and co-owner Joel Glazer, close the boardroom door behind them and stare at each other across the desk, what do they cling to in order to justify sticking with their struggling manager?

Sources have told ESPN that the absence of a credible, and available, replacement -- with the likes of Xavi, Gareth Southgate, Oliver Glasner, Fabian Hurzeler and Andoni Iraola all being linked in the media -- is a significant factor in Amorim remaining in his post. But there is also an acceptance that results have been way below expectations and that the Portuguese has yet to coax genuine improvement from the squad he inherited from Ten Hag last November.

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The off-field upheaval at Old Trafford that has seen hundreds of staff lose their jobs in a cost-cutting drive has hung over Amorim throughout his time in charge, leading to morale being impacted across the club, and that is a mitigating factor.

Amorim is also not responsible for the mistakes of previous managers and decision-makers at United. For instance, he was not at the club when sub-standard players such as Joshua Zirkzee and Manuel Ugarte were added to Ten Hag's squad in the summer of 2024 -- the same window that saw Scott McTominay leave for Napoli in a £25 million transfer; half the fee it cost to sign Ugarte from Paris Saint-Germain in the same week.

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