What will Ruben Amorim bring to Manchester United? According to many credible reports at this time, It is said that the agreement between Manchester United and Sporting Lisbon is almost done for the hiring of head coach, Ruben Amorim.
So today, we’re going to look at his tactics, philosophies, set-up, in and out of possession, the personality of the man who will be Manchester United’s next permanent manager.
We would try to see what he did at Sporting and how that can all come to Manchester United and bring success to the club.
Ruben Amorim has garnered lots of attention and plaudits for his job at Sporting Lisbon. He brought them their first league title in 19 years by playing a new, modern, and interesting style of football.
Let’s just get straight into this.
What formation does he play?
Ruben mostly plays a 3-4-3 formation. Of course, with all modern formations, there’s different variations on that. Sometimes they can switch to a 2-1-1-2-4 and all sorts of variations.
Fundamentally, it’s three centre-backs, wing-backs wide on the pitch, two midfielders, two wingers and a striker upfront.
Man United have struggled to have a cohesive style from game to game in recent seasons which was one of the many reasons Erik Ten Hag Struggled and received a lot of criticism.
That’s something that would absolutely be different under Ruben Amorim. Let’s first of all have a look at how his teams play below.
Starting with building out from the back, as with most modern teams, most modern managers, keeping the ball and controlling it from your goal to their goal, is crucial to Ruben Amorim’s play.
He’s a very high-possession, high-chance-creating manager. His tactics have seen his team go nine wins, zero losses, zero draws in the first nine games this season, scoring 30 and only conceding two in the process as well. They also scored 96 league goals the season they won the league last year. That’s an amazing feat to achieve.
Amorim’s Sporting are just a team who creates a hell of a lot of chances and doesn’t concede many chances. It’s sort of very, very modern football and the type of gameplay you’d expect from a United side trying to get back to the top.
How They Play Out.
Above is a shot from last season’s Europa League against Arsenal. The tie they eventually went on to win with penalties. You can see here immediately on the ball, it’s a two, four, one settings, and then obviously further up the pitch, you’ve got the attackers and the wingers. This is how they play out from the back
Amorim is an absolute master of the press and it’s not just how his team’s press but how he basically manipulates the opposition’s press. He wants them to come on to him, to push really high up, so they leave gaps in behind. He’s not frightened to go long and change things or do things a little bit differently as well.
When he does his build up from defense, what they’ll often do is you see these balls, these out balls to the wings which is obviously something that United tend to do a lot at the moment and try and play those kind of Rondo style build-ups on the wings getting out that way. Check below for illustration
Something that they’ll do quite often is these sort of ping passes into that midfield or a defensive midfielder, who’s now acting as a defensive midfielder and they’ll tend to do these bounce back passes to the goalkeeper.
Occasionally, they’ll do this thing where they’ll try to bring the opposition on and then what they’ll do is the keeper will go back to the defender and the ball will also end up back where it started. But now the opposition has been manipulated to the other side of the pitch and pulled out of position.
Attached below is another illustration where eventually, they do that sort of ping pong passing and they break through the opposition’s press.
In a more kind of traditional way, they’re playing out from the back, keeping possession, short passes and breaking through opposition’s press.
If you look in the picture above again, you can see on this front line, Sporting have got a three vs three that they can utilise and exploit in many different ways.
Also, you still see that the wingers pushing really, really wide, and oftentimes, like I mentioned before, they use them as dummies. These are sort of decoy players holding that position in order to allow spaces in the middle for players to make runs.
People have to push up and cover those wing backs. Which means that the strikers and the attacking midfielders ahead of them have a lot more space. Look below for illustration
This sequences is something that his team does time and time and time again. Always trying to create space in the centre of the pitch which is what he feels is basically the most important area on the whole pitch.
So a second piece of build-up play here that I want to show you, it looks very similar to the last one.
If you can see what the image portrays, basically you would see you’ve got the two centre-backs, in the middle, you’ve got the third centre-back, the two wing-backs out wide and that second defensive midfielder there. This is about the flexibility of Ruben Amorim.
Once again, the Arsenal press has pushed right up the pitch there, trying to win the ball back from Sporting. Again, they’ve managed to sort of have these players out wide who have got a lot more space as you’d expect out in these wing areas because they try to stretch the pitch.
Both full backs of them touching the sidelines there means that there’s a maximum amount of space for those players to be found in.
In the last one, where they ping the ball back and forth between the centre-backs and the goalkeeper. This time, the players know and the manager knows where the runs are going to be made. They just go along with it. The centre-back just sees the runner in the distance and plays the ball straight over the top and this was just as effective.
They basically, Arsenal, as we have shown in details above, didn’t expect this to happen because most teams will have a plan and stick to it. Sporting nearly scored from that play but the ball goes wide. Imagine Marcus Rashford or Garnacho were on the end of that chance, you may well see a different outcome. That tactical flexibility that is so crucial for Ruben.
We saw with Erik Ten Hag at times he would stick to his style regardless of injuries or personnel and sometimes that would cost the team. He wouldn’t have the legs in midfield to support his sort of up and down football.
So as we have discussed earlier, Amorim’s system is more of a 2-4-2-2. when they’re playing the ball out from the back with that extra centre-back and it just means that there is more area covered across the pitch.
The only downside to this is it relies on your centre-backs being very good on the ball. If they can’t find those out balls, over the top, it going to hinder the flow of the system. Maybe Martinez or De Light can play that pass. But you do have to have good players to play this system and I think that’s something
Do you think it would work out for Ruben Amorim at Manchester United?
Do you think his system would be safe to play in the Premier League?
What do you think of the Manchester United players been capable of executing this system?
Let’s know your thought using the comment box below.
Thank you for reading.