Manchester United perfectly embodies the adage “when you love, you don’t count”. Getting off to a bad start in the championship and having its worst start to a season in over thirty years, the Mancunian Football club dismissed its coach, Eric ten Hag, at the end of October. Extended at the beginning of the summer (until 2026), the Dutch technician is released from his contract for the tidy sum of 16 million euros – according to The Telegraph. To replace him, the Red Devils have set their sights on Ruben Amorim, whose recruitment they formalized on Friday 1is November.
A brilliant representative of the young guard of European coaches, the 39-year-old Portuguese technician was not free. Since 2020, he has played brilliantly on the bench of Sporting Portugal (two national championship titles) with whom he must face Manchester United's neighbor, Manchester City, on Tuesday in the Champions League. To poach him, United management had to take out the checkbook and pay a clause of more than 10 million euros. Because, in 2024, the transfer window no longer only concerns players, which clubs exchange for crazy sums: coaches are in turn transferable.
Recruited by the club from the north of England during the season, Ruben Amorim does not immediately slam the door of the Lisbon team. He will only join Manchester United after November 11, “once he has fulfilled all his obligations” towards the Lisbon club, specify the Red Devils in a press release. In the meantime, the former glory of the club Ruud van Nistelrooy takes over in the interim.
Between the transfer compensation and that owed to Erik ten Hag, the operation amounts to around 30 million euros for Manchester United, owned by the Ineos group and British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe.
The Amorim case, a coveted trainer
If calling on a new coach during the season is quite common in football – it is generally the first fuse –, clubs paying large sums to secure the services of a technician already in place remain rare . And one of the pioneers is none other than… Ruben Amorim. In 2020, the young coach had already been poached by Sporting during the season against the payment of a clause of 10 million euros to his then club, SC Braga.
If Bayern Munich had broken the bank in 2021 – the German media mention a sum of 25 million euros – to secure the services of Julian Nagelsmann, then on the bench of RB Leipzig, it is above all across the Channel that the practice of the transfer window for coaches is in full swing. The richest championship in the world – for the 2023-2024 financial year, the English championship received nearly 4 billion euros in TV rights, according to figures from the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) –, including teams are spending huge amounts of money to recruit players to strengthen them, the Premier League is starting to do the same when it comes to coaches.
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In November 2021, Aston Villa paid more than four million euros to Glasgow Rangers to hire Steven Gerrard. The operation being inconclusive, a year later, the Villains hired the Spaniard Unai Emery, then coach of Villarreal, for six million euros. But the London club remains far from its neighbor Chelsea. In September 2022, the Blues recruited Graham Potter, then stationed at Brighton, for 24 million euros, before dismissing him seven months later for lack of results. Rather than a direct dismissal, the British technician continues to receive compensation of 200,000 euros per week, according to the Daily Mail.
If Manchester United chose to pull out their wallets to secure the services of Ruben Amorim, it was also because the competition was tough. The technician with an innovative game and convincing results (9 victories in 9 matches, 30 goals scored and only 2 conceded this season in the league) was courted by several European teams, starting with Manchester City who saw in him a possible successor to Pep Guardiola , whose contract ends in 2025. “ Since he arrived at Sporting, the team has played some of the most beautiful football. He has all the qualities to flourish in English, French or Spanish football”highlighted Manchester United’s Portuguese international Bruno Fernandes in October. From November 11, the midfielder will be in the front row, in the “Theater of Dreams” at Old Trafford, to check if his prediction about his compatriot was correct.
