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FootBiz newsletter #131: What Amorim's sacking tells us about Man United
PLUS: Would outspoken Glasner simply be more of the same?
Ed Malyon & Matt Hughes
January 06, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
After missing the playoffs on Sunday, Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Todd Bowles likely didn’t get much sleep before Black Monday.
The first Monday in January carries a weighty significance in the NFL as the regular season ends and many coaches and General Managers discover their fates.
Bowles escaped the immediate termination that befell coaches in Cleveland, Arizona and Las Vegas yesterday but has talks scheduled with the Glazer family this week.
He may only have that stay of execution because the Glazers were somewhat occupied with a more high-profile firing across the Atlantic in Manchester, where United boss Ruben Amorim was finally put out of his misery on Black Monday.
Black Monday, though, implies a darkness and sadness to proceedings.
No such unhappiness was obvious as Ruben Amorim strolled through the Cheshire snow with his wife, beaming as he contemplated the £10m payoff and freedom from a job that it had become increasingly obvious that he did not want.
Amorim didn’t seem devastated to have been let go as United boss
Amorim’s gradual cranking up of the heat on United over Christmas were the spiralling actions of an operative who was deeply displeased with the structure he found himself in. It is worth noting that it is not precisely the one he was hired into. Indeed, the man who now runs things at Old Trafford, director of football Jason Wilcox, was called out by name in the final, and most incendiary of Amorim’s festive period meetings with the Mancunian press pack. That same press pack were later all briefed that a huge blow-up on Friday between Amorim and Wilcox had been the final straw.
The reality of Amorim’s increasingly wild outbursts were that the situation had become untenable with him as head coach, albeit by his own design. His claim over the weekend that he “came to Manchester United to be manager, not head coach” is fundamentally at odds with how the club has announced and described Amorim from the very beginning. It is not feasible (or certainly not advisable) for a modern club, let alone one of United’s size and ambitions, to be run top-to-bottom by a Fergusonian autocrat.
Amorim wanted more players, or different players, and Wilcox in conjunction with his bosses had informed the Portuguese coach that there would not be significant reinforcements this month. Wilcox and company are looking out for the medium- and long-term interests of the club, Amorim was trying to save his job… until he went the opposite way.
The Portuguese coach’s subsequent tantrum underlined one of the consistent themes of his reign as United boss, that he couldn’t get improved performance (or really any performance at all) out of the squad he had. That remained true even after many additions to the squad in previous windows.
Amorim made his name at Sporting and Braga with a swashbuckling 3-4-2-1
When you are a system coach, a fundamentalist for the shape you play and too dogmatic to change, then it sure as hell better be a system that takes players and makes them perform. Partly due to the huge similarities in the systems they played, Amorim’s inability to get his famed 3-4-2-1 purring was often compared to Oliver Glasner, who took a squad that was built for (and operated by) Roy Hodgson and made it into a double trophy winner in no time at all.
Glasner has been reported as the frontrunner for the job, though there is no way Palace would let him leave now and thus an interim until the summer would be necessary. However, if United opt for Glasner to replace Amorim then they may well be inviting upon themselves the same issues as before, given Glasner has spent much of the last month publicly calling out his club for a lack of reinforcements.
Crystal Palace’s Glasner situation has become something of a cyclical issue where it makes no sense to give Glasner who he wants during the transfer window when his contract expires in six months but, equally, Glasner’s remote possibility of re-signing with Palace continues to decline if heavy reinforcements don’t arrive.
On top of that, if one of the criticisms of United has been that Amorim doesn’t have the right players to fit his system then why would you hire another coach who plays the same shape?
You could argue that Glasner simply does it better than the Portuguese, but it seems a little like you’re signing up for round two of the same.
While it isn’t particularly surprising that United’s sporting overlords INEOS sided with Wilcox over Amorim, the former Southampton director of football has now been backed (and promoted) by Sir Jim Ratcliffe to the cost of Dan Ashworth, widely considered one of the best operators in the business, and Amorim, one of Europe’s most highly-rated young coaches.
What exactly Wilcox has done to earn this level of benefit of the doubt is unclear.
Is Glasner the answer for Man United? Or more of the same?
The former Blackburn Rovers midfielder did not exactly transform Southampton and was academy manager at Manchester City before that. Beyond his relationship with Omar Berrada, another former City Football Group executive, there is little obvious reason to believe that Wilcox is the guy to lead this turn around or that he would survive another botched hire at Old Trafford.
Especially so when you take into account that one of the reasons that Berrada and Wilcox were chosen (and Ashworth prematurely defenestrated) was the pair’s decisiveness in going to get Amorim over other candidates while Ashworth was perceived to have dawdled. Perhaps Ashworth was right?
A wider question would be why CFG executives tend to be so over-promoted across football.
Ask yourself this: if City are proven guilty in the 130 charges process, and their raft of trophies in that period are tarnished, what would the view be of that success in the future?
Choosing Wilcox over Ashworth was a bold move from United that has shown few signs of paying off as yet. Choosing Wilcox over Amorim should at least see an uptick in results, given the Portuguese leaves with the worst win percentage of any of the 10 coaches since Sir Alex Ferguson retired, but Wilcox’s own United career may depend on getting it right.
Anyway, welcome to 2026. Lots beyond the wall today including a deeper look at who could replace Amorim, the continued meltdown of Scotland’s Old Firm, DAZN’s latest mess, some historic talks between the Premier League and EFL as well as a load more.
