By John Lee
On the face of it, Rúben Amorim has had a hell of a start to his journey as a coach, but it’s surely too early for one of the big boys to come knocking. After all, he only has 190 games under his belt in his current role; before becoming Sporting manager, Amorim had just 13 games at Braga as first-team coach. That’s it. That doesn’t seem like enough experience for the next manager of the world’s greatest football team. Amorim’s win rate of 70% is impressive, but it is not an unusual figure in the Portuguese league: Sergio Conceição at Porto has been at the helm of the northern Portuguese club for much longer and maintains a success rate above 72%, and Conceição is an unapologetic blurt who nobody is hoping for as their next boss, except his frankly average son, Francisco.
So what’s the story? Why did Sporting Clube de Portugal (not Sporting Lisbon!) pay Braga €10 million to bring him to the Estádio José Alvalade after a handful of games, and why are some of the biggest teams in Europe even considering the 39-year-old ex-midfielder, when all evidence suggests his career is far too nascent to warrant serious deliberation?
First, there is the obvious: Amorim took Sporting to their first Portuguese League victory in 19 years. And he did it in some style. Amorim arrived late in the 2019-20 season and didn’t make an immediate impression, winning six and losing three games to finish the campaign in 4th position in the league. Those losses included games against Benfica and Porto, meaning that Amorim could have been in trouble early on.
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The 2020-21 season could not have been more of a surprise after that uninspiring start. Sporting went on a run of 32 unbeaten games, a national record, with only one loss over the entire season (even if it was against Benfica in the Lisbon derby – that was May 15 and Sporting were well and truly ensconced on the beach by then). In Premier League terms, Sporting winning the league was not as surprising as Leicester in 2016, but doing it in this fashion was something that nobody could have predicted on the same level as the Foxes’ famous foray.
To truly understand how incredible this achievement was, it’s necessary to go back a couple of years before. Sporting had been in disarray back in 2018. The lowest point occurred when a group of fans stormed the training ground and attacked the players. Bas Dost, the league’s leading goalscorer at the time, was badly beaten and cried on national television as he described the scenes. He understandably tore up his contract, although was later persuaded to stay until the end of the season. The fan base was in turmoil; the club crumbling. Anecdotally, around Lisbon at the time, there were two schools of thought: yes, it was outrageous for a group of fans to physically attack the players, but these were largely drunken teenagers and coked-up ex-ultras – the training ground would have contained the whole first-team, reserve team, youth players and training staff, so where was the fight back?! This victim-blaming is clearly unedifying, but it highlights how low things had got: Sportingistas just wanted to see the team do something, anything, to show that they hadn’t lost their way entirely, even if that was just fighting back against their own fans.
It later emerged that the attack on the training ground may have, mind-blowingly, been an inside job, allegedly organised by Sporting president, Bruno de Carvalho, to force out some high-profile players on expensive contracts. In that respect, it worked – several big names left soon after, including Bruno Fernandes to Manchester United. Sporting was in dire need of a rebuild – maybe even a demolition. Over the next year, five different managers before Amorim came and went. Take a moment with that – five managers in one calendar year. None of them could unite the players, owners and fan base as Sporting continued to freefall into obscurity, on the way to being overtaken as Portugal’s third-biggest team by Braga.
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Rúben Amorim’s biggest claim to a move to a European powerhouse might be this: he didn’t just lead this team on an incredible season; he did it with an absolute basket-case of a club President, a scarred fanbase, and a shoestring budget.
The next two seasons saw Sporting finish 2nd and 4th in the league respectively, with the team picking up the Portuguese Super Cup and the League Cup in 2022 and getting to the League Cup Final for the fourth consecutive year in 2023, only to lose to Porto. In Europe, Sporting outperformed expectations over this period, upsetting the Europa League with surprise victories over Borussia Dortmund, Spurs and Arsenal.
Amorim has also proven to be astute in the transfer market with not much room for error, signing Viktor Gyökeres from Coventry City for €20 million. The Swedish giant already has 22 goals in 25 games this season and plenty of clubs will be looking to test Sporting’s resolve to keep the forward. Sporting is a buy-to-sell club, unable to compete with the neighbours in Lisbon, let alone the rest of Europe. The players that Amorim has brought in during his tenure who have done well tend to get sold almost immediately – João Palhinha, Pedro Porro and Matheus Nunes all headed for the Premier League after just one season under Amorim. For this reason, it’s hard to judge what he would be able to do with greater resources, or with players who were not at risk of being auctioned off every transfer window.
At the time of writing, Sporting are top of the Portuguese Primeira Liga, with a one-point advantage and a game in hand over their rivals, Benfica. Just yesterday night, they beat Benfica over two legs to reach the final of the Portugal Cup for the first time since winning the competition on penalties against Porto in 2019.
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For anyone who hasn’t listened to Rúben Amorim speak or noted his tactical flexibility, he is a truly modern manager. When he retired from playing, rather than moving into punditry, he studied for his post-grad in psychomotor education. Me neither, but Google says that it is a ‘pedagogic and therapeutic approach to support and aid personal development, based on a holistic view of human beings that considers each individual as a unity of physical, emotional and cognitive actualities, which interact with each other and the surrounding social environment’. So, not from the Mike Bassett School of Man Management.
Amorim embodies a cool, laid-back leadership. Not incapable of showing emotion, but restrained. He has repeatedly refused to be drawn into comment on referees or other managers, frustrating Portuguese journalists who know that the drama of previous incumbents shifted more papers (or generated more clicks is probably more accurate nowadays). Amorim’s English is excellent, and (opinion incoming) he comes across well in interviews. Likeable, funny, disarming.
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Amorim embodies a cool, laid-back leadership. Not incapable of showing emotion, but restrained. He has repeatedly refused to be drawn into comment on referees or other managers, frustrating Portuguese journalists who know that the drama of previous incumbents shifted more papers (or generated more clicks is probably more accurate nowadays). Amorim’s English is excellent, and (opinion incoming) he comes across well in interviews. Likeable, funny, disarming.
Much has been made of the fact that Amorim is an exponent of three at the back, and whether this can transfer to the faster, more physical English game. He likes to play with two ‘sitting’ midfielders in front of the defence, smothering attacks and reducing space. This season, he has also utilised a more attacking shape, using just one defensively-minded midfielder and fluid attacking five, plus an old-school number 9 whose job is to score the goals. His Sporting side are intense in the press and looks to exploit space created by marauding wing-backs while maintaining control and limiting opponents’ chances. It could be said, if you’re feeling a bit generous, that Amorim is adopting characteristics of all three title challengers in this year’s English Premier League: Klopp’s attacking press, Guardiola’s midfield stranglehold and Arteta’s defensive control.
Would Amorim stick with three at the back if he became the next Liverpool manager? His career is too short to make good arguments one way or the other. It’s entirely plausible that he plays this formation pragmatically to get the best out of the players that he has in the current squad. It’s equally likely that this is his preferred formation, and he would bend the team to his will. If Amorim were to stick to three at the back, this Liverpool team is capable of making it work: Trent Alexander-Arnold could be utilised as a wing-back, or step into one of the two sitting midfield roles; Mac Allister and Szoboszlai would have more advanced roles; the current five senior forwards have the experience and intelligence to tweak their games, probably operating with the forwards wider than we are accustomed to right now. At least one more centre-half would have to come in, but the bones are there already. The feeling from Sporting fans, though, is that too much is being made of this by the British press. Amorim is far from an idiot. Nobody needs to tell him that what works in the Portuguese league might not work in England. Don’t forget, Sporting’s club captain since Amorim took over has been Sebastián Coates: the player who Liverpool let go in 2014 because he turned like an oil tanker has been leading the Sporting defence for the best part of a decade. These are not leagues that bear much of a comparison, which is another issue: Amorim is not just inexperienced, but the experience he has is managing in a league comparable to the Scottish Prem, and that wasn’t good enough to get Stevie the job.
On paper, Rúben Amorim does not have the kind of record that should be turning heads in Europe’s most illustrious boardrooms. But he has a little something about him that is different from the other contenders; an irrepressible understatedness and malleability that belie his years.
It’s a bit like if Liverpool had given the job to Jürgen Klopp straight from Mainz before he went to Borussia Dortmund. Who knows how that could have worked out, but it means that we’d have missed out on the last couple of years of Benitez, all of Hodgson, King Kenny’s brief return and Rodgers. An extra seven years of Klopp, except it doesn’t quite work like that, of course. Nice to dream, though. Especially about never having seen Paul Konchesky in a red shirt.
John Lee: Scouser and Liverpool fan, based in Portugal for the last 18 years.
If you’re on your hols in sunny Lisbon, look for LFC Lisboa on Facebook – we never miss a game!
