Results, culture, and the myth of the back three
Ruben Amorim was sacked by Manchester United not because of tactics, but because poor results and a cultural mismatch made his leadership feel reactive and un-United.
We have heard the United commentariat. We have sat through the podcasts and the tactical soliloquies, the ruminations on shapes and structures delivered with the solemnity of a constitutional inquiry. Ruben’s intransigence. Back three versus back four, they say. This was the problem. This was the undoing.
It was not.
In its purest form, a back three has one fewer defender than a back four, thanks to the little acknowledged principle that three is, numerically speaking, smaller than four. But Manchester United were not really playing a back three at all. What they were playing was something more timid, more existentially uncertain. A shape that began as a three and quickly retreated into a five at the first hint of danger.
Dalot. Mazraoui. Occasionally Dorgu. Each seemed magnetically drawn towards their own penalty area, wing backs in theory, full-backs in practice. At Sporting Lisbon, Amorim’s system thrived because the wide players stayed high and wide, stretching the pitch and creating a 3 2 5 in possession. At United, the wings were abandoned, the width surrendered, the system quietly folded in on itself.
Had United backed Amorim with actual flying wing backs of the Frimpong variety, the story might have been different. But they did not. And so it was not.
What United truly lacked was not a formation but intensity and cohesion. When Burnley midfielders are afforded ten seconds on the ball to pick a pass, the geometry of your defence becomes largely irrelevant. You can draw the prettiest shapes imaginable on a tactics board and still be undone by the simple refusal or inability to close anyone down.
This, to be fair, was what Amorim pleaded for. Intensity. Cohesion. And this, less forgivably, was what he failed to impose. At some point the manager must stop diagnosing the illness and begin prescribing the treatment.
In the end, Amorim was dismissed for two reasons. Results, or rather the persistent lack thereof. And culture. He did not fit. And he wasn’t going to.
Culture is an amorphous word in football, frequently invoked and rarely defined. But it matters. It always has. Which brings us, inevitably, to a story. Perhaps apocryphal, but The Update heard it first hand from a chief executive who seemed as genuinely sincere as he was intimidating.
Once upon a time there was a chief executive at an asset management firm. We will call him Nigel Ledgerfield, for discretion and because it feels right. Nigel was a Liverpool supporter and he was deeply unhappy with Roy Hodgson. Not merely unhappy with the results, but with the tone. Hodgson, he felt, did not speak like a Liverpool manager. He did not sound like one.
Nigel had previously worked with Tom Werner in the 1990s, a period of excess when fortunes were made faster than you could say “sell me this pen,”. So Nigel exercised his access. Not with an email. Not with a phone call. But with a letter. An actual letter, quill optional. Sent sometime in December 2010, at a time when Roy’s tenure was truly beginning to unravel.
The letter dwelt on Hodgson’s press conferences. The talk of relegation battles. The weeks spent on the training pitches at Melwood, preparing to neutralise Blackburn’s fearsome attack. Nigel felt this language was unbecoming. Liverpool, he argued, should be focussing on their own strengths. About what opponents must do to stop them. Not about how to survive encounters with teams loitering near the bottom of the table. Needless to say, Blackburn won, their world class attack purring, putting Liverpool to the sword.
Nigel, humbly likes to take credit for what followed. The dismissal. The revival. The success. Not Brendan Rodgers , and certainly not Jurgen Klopp. Just one letter, written perhaps by candlelight, that bent footballing history to his will. It is a wonderful story. Possibly even true.
And this is where Amorim’s fate was sealed.
Asked why United had effectively handed Wolves a third of their entire points tally, Amorim explained that he had reverted to a back three in order to match them. Wolves, who at that point had collected two points. Now three. Wolves, who were quietly assembling a case for one of the bleakest Premier League seasons on record.
Wolves. Matching. Wolves.
That sentence alone would have set off alarm bells in any boardroom. This was not Manchester United. This was not the club’s self image, flawed though it may be. This was not imposing yourself, bending the game to your will. It was accommodating. It was deferential. It was hauntingly familiar.
It sounded like Moyes. And Moyes, for all his virtues, never fit the culture either.
At that moment, the conclusion became unavoidable. The issue was not the back three. Or the back five. Or any number you care to name.
The issue was that the manager no longer spoke the language of the club.
And once that happens, the jig is, invariably, up.
After all, This Is Manchester United We’re Talking About.
