The managerial merry-go-round threatens to swing off its hinges this summer and for those heavily invested in its machinations a word of warning: fashion plays an oversized part in this sport.
Eighteen months ago Ruben Amorim was the first name casually thrown onto shortlists for mid-ranking Premier League clubs like Aston Villa and Wolves. Around this time last year, amid a disappointing season, he was supposedly bumped up to the shortlists for Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea.
Now back atop the Primeira Liga table Amorim is said to be the first choice for Liverpool, Barcelona, and Bayern Munich.
Most clubs still aren’t run by particularly smart football people. Once a name is in the mix for a top job other clubs follow and a bidding war built on wilful delusion can commence. It is no different to the transfer market in that respect.
Groupthink takes over and the flavour of the month becomes the must-have accessory.
Next permanent Liverpool manager (odds via Sky Bet)
- Rúben Amorim - 1/5
- Roberto De Zerbi - 14/1
- Julian Nagelsmann - 14/1
- Ange Postecoglou - 18/1
- Thomas Tuchel - 20/1
- Gary O'Neil - 20/1
Odds correct as 1030 GMT (09/04/24)
Who is Ruben Amorim?
None of which is to say Amorim isn’t what everyone says he is: the next world-class manager in waiting, a peppy young innovator set to take Europe’s ‘Big Five’ by storm as soon as he gets a chance. Portuguese football experts are convinced he’s the real deal, convinced that his furious pressing and fluid vertical possession - very much in-vogue – reveal an unusual tactical intelligence for someone so young.
But we should give pause simply to consider just how much everybody wants it to be true. That can be a red flag; a giant vermilion banner with Andre Villas-Boas’s face on it. His record is very good. But the signs of myth-making, of willing his genius into existence, are undeniable.
Amorim was famously plucked from Braga for €10 million, at the time the fourth highest fee ever paid for a manager, after just 13 games in charge. This helps his legend - of course it does - but what can Sporting CP realistically have seen in a baker’s dozen matches, played mid-season no less, in early 2020?
Well, they saw something. He promptly won the league title in his first full season at Sporting, ending a 19-year wait. That is brilliant, no question, as was accruing 84 points from 34 matches the following campaign (finishing runners-up). Coming fourth in 2022/23 was a disappointment but Sporting topping the table as we enter the run-in of 2023/24 is, again, a big success for the third-biggest club in Portugal.
Games against the best questionable
Tempering this excitement is Sporting’s relatively meh performance in Europe since Amorim took charge. They were knocked out of the Europa League play-offs by Austrian side LASK in 2020/21; beat Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League group stages in 2021/22 but were hammered 5-0 by Manchester City in the second round; squeezed through Arsenal on penalties in the Europa League in 2022/23 before being knocked out by Juventus; and lost to Atalanta in the last 16 of the Europa League this year.
There are some good results in there but it’s a mixed bag for a manager tipped to take one of the biggest jobs in the world. Worse than that, it is essentially unreadable, given that Sporting were routinely forced to sit deep and play on the counter-attack in those marquee matches, which isn’t at all how Amorim would coach Liverpool.
Putting the buzz around Amorim to one side, what we have here is a 39-year-old with four years’ experience overachieving in Europe’s seventh-best league. And the scale of that overachievement is subjective. On the one hand a 19-year wait was ended two seasons ago. On the other, their revival this year is partly thanks to over-hitting their xG by an incredible 19.5 goals, suggesting a healthy slice of fortune has helped put them one point ahead of Benfica.
Is this quite enough to take over at Liverpool? It’s an unfortunate side effect of modern football’s entrenched hierarchies that we can never be sure if a manager can step up. The gap between the best clubs in Portugal and the best in England is so wide that coaches must abandon their tactical principles in head-to-heads with Man City or Arsenal. The gap is so wide that huge success in the Primeira Liga may teach us nothing about a manager’s suitability to the Premier League.
Tactics could be a good fit
All we have to go on are the tactics. At least here, Amorim is a decent fit for Liverpool, albeit with further caveats.
He exclusively uses a 3-4-2-1 formation to play possession-dominant football filtered through the central column of the pitch. The automatisms he teaches aim at moving vertically; attacking quickly in set patterns that rely on aggressive wing-backs and a fluid front three who readily swap roles to receive passes from the double pivots.
Out of possession, Sporting press high and hard when they can, although when forced back into their own half the shape becomes a flat 5-4-1 that, again, looks to limit space centrally.
All of this aligns with the modern trend and, to an extent, follows how Jurgen Klopp has coached Liverpool. Certainly Amorim is comparable in the emotionality of the football, the singularity of the vision, and the belief in improving individual players. Sporting overachieve by being aggressive, hard-working, and tactically flexible. Liverpool have a squad already in that mould.
The formation change is less straightforward. A summer rebuild in Liverpool’s midfield makes reverting to a midfield double pivot an awkward fit, plus the intensity and transition-heavy nature of English football tends to make a 3-4-2-1 too open for possession-centric sides. Nobody at the top has tried that since Antonio Conte at Chelsea, which is pre the Klopp and Pep Guardiola revolutions.
Reds would be taking a huge gamble
In better news, Amorim's tendency to retrain wingers as wing-backs means he could create a formidable partnership of Trent Alexander-Arnold (whose defensive frailties would matter less with a back three) and Luis Diaz, while a position-swapping front three suits Mohamed Salah, Darwin Nunez, and Diogo Jota.
But it’s all completely hypothetical. Amorim would need to adapt significantly to cope with the jump from Portugal to England, perhaps meaning a formation change or even leaning heavily into the structure Klopp has put in place. So early in his managerial career, we have no idea how dogmatic Amorim would prove to be.
In all honesty, we don’t know much at all. What we do know is that Amorim, a man suddenly wanted by everyone who’s anyone, is the latest emblem of a modern phenomenon: the exotic potential mega-genius, a man onto whom we can project our wildest hopes precisely because he is an unknown entity. If we believe he is the saviour then so he will prove to be.
Liverpool hiring Amorim might be a masterstroke. But the archetype is Klopp, who arrived at Anfield an undisputed superstar after winning consecutive Bundesliga titles with Borussia Dortmund. By comparison, moving for Amorim is a leap into the darkness.
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