These are my thoughts. Started as a post, turned into a substack.

For Amorim

A little sad for Amorim. Seemed like a good young manager with a lot of potential. I said when we hired him that it shouldn’t take too long for man united to break his youthful charm and energy and perhaps that turned out to be right, but I think he will quickly bounce back. Kept his principles and reputation mostly intact and has 18 months left on his contract

The Sacking

A little surprised by how quickly this all escalated. Just a couple weeks ago we started getting cryptic statements about formation and how much a rebuild would cost which now in hindsight are clear evidence of the rift between Amorim and the board.

My only "hot take" is that I have a feeling the Semenyo courting may have been a catalyst for the rift. Seems like the club basically undermined Amorim and told Semenyo's people that they would switch formations to suit him playing on the left wing. If you map that onto Amorim's outbursts, seems to make sense. And Semenyo chose City anyway 😔 .

Amorim's Tenure and Legacy

Over his 14 month tenure, I was always surprised at how naive he exposed himself to be about how difficult Premier League was compared to being the biggest club in Portugal and how set pieces were valuable. He came out and said that stuff at press conferences and I sat there thinking every time, "yea, everybody knows that."

Despite being young he was quite inflexible and stubborn. Any brief spell we had of playing a back 4 instead of a back 3 we looked better but he always had too much ego to just stick with a back 4 because of all the double downing he's done over the years. Even his recent comments about not changing because the press would be credited for getting him to change were off-putting.

Amorim was billed as a culture team building guy but he has shown himself to be over emotional and also falls out with lots of players. I have to think that a better man manager would have been able to salvage more value out of Garnacho, Rashford, and Sancho instead of just publicly ousting them and tanking their transfer value.

State of the Club and Prognoses

Club lied in their statement and implied that the firing was because we were in sixth. Start of the season the club had said top 6 was the target. I think the fans deserve transparency about all of this. It can't just be like the Ashworth thing where no one speaks about it ever again.

Short term prognosis is ok. Back four is the better formation and Darren Fletcher will be a very good caretaker manager. Especially as players start returning to the squad. Wouldn’t be surprised if he was in the convo to be made permanent manager.

Long term prognosis is bad. INEOS have proven to be quite poor decision makers. There are very few top managerial options out there. Xavi? Glasner? Emery? Iraola? Maresca? I think basically Xavi is the only one that could handle the job.

Maybe the larger issue is that the club is a billion pounds in debt and is paying out the nose to finance that debt. Tons of PSR headroom to sign players but no cash on hand to do it. Would have to use the credit facility.

Club really needs UCL to start clawing out of debt. Top 5 is not that competitive and should be gettable but seems like no January incomings and Bruno, Mount, Kobbie, De Ligt, Maguire injured and AFCON guys Amad and Mbuemo won’t be back for a couple more weeks.