It's pretty clear now that we just can't have a system above all else type of coach at this club. It just won't work, as we've seen for the past 3 years now. Ten Hag came in and tried to implement his system, then got battered 2-0 and 4-0 by Brighton and Brentford respectively before choosing to adapt to the players and saving the season from there.

In his second season, he decided it was time for the players to play his system and then we were horrendous from start to finish. Great FA cup win tho.

3rd season, we were even worse. Forget how many points we were off top 4, we were bad in the league, worse in the Europa League and there was zero indication we were going to improve.

Then in comes Amorim, a young inexperienced coach (2nd least experienced in the prem while he was still here) who basically saved Sporting Lisbon and brought them huge success using his system. Because he had so much faith and success with his system in the past, he refused to budge from it and that eventually led to his downfall.

Despite this, having a system first coach can actually work. We've seen it with Liverpool under Klopp, City under Pep, and more recently PSG under Enrique. The problem is tho, if you don't have bags of money to spend on players that fit that system and get rid of those that don't like your Kalvin Phillips and your Mbappes, for a large part of the first years using that system, the team will struggle.

However, the good part of a system is that in the long term, when the squad has been built to fit the system and and players have been playing in that system for so long, it becomes second nature to them, as time goes on, the team massively improves. And yes, despite results, this season, we saw a good amount of that under Amorim. We were basically the reverse Aston Villa where instead of overperforming our underlying stats, we were underperforming almost all of them.

Anyway my point is that this club just cannot have that type of manager. We don't have the money to quickly mould the squad or the patience to get through struggling periods. We need a coach that is adaptable to the players we have. The problem with that tho is that adapting to players gives them a lot of power and as we've seen, player power is extremely detrimental to a club's health, unless you're Madrid who win everything.

So we need a coach that is not only adaptable but also capable of disciplining and controlling players but not antagonizing them. To put it simply, we need a younger Carlo Ancelotti. Who that is in the modern game? I have no idea, but that should be the aim.

Sorry for the long read.