In a recent interview, co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe came out in defense of his under fire manager Ruben Amorim. The Portuguese has had a tough start to his first full season in charge but while there has been loads and I mean loads of talk about his future, this may just be part one of a trilogy with the 40-year-old at the helm.
Speaking to The Times, Ratcliffe said "he has not had the best of seasons. Ruben needs to demonstrate he is a great coach over three years. That's where I would be.
You can't run a club like Man United on knee-jerk reactions to some journalist who goes off on one every week."
He also spoke about the majority owners the Glazers and if they had asked him to sack Amorim, what would his response be: "It's not going to happen", replied Ratcliffe whose INEOS oversee the football operations at Old Trafford.
Ratcliffe mentions how the Glazers "get a bad rap" and how "they are really nice people" which probably won't put him in United fans' good books, not like he was to begin with given him keeping the Glazers at the club and the countless cost-cutting measures he's taken.
Speaking of which, the British billionaire said that "the costs were too high" in reference as to why he let go of 450 staff. "There are some fantastic people at Manchester United, but there was also a level of mediocrity and it had become bloated.
I got a lot of flak for the free lunches, but no-one's ever given me a free lunch."
He says that the more cash you have, the better the chances are of you building a great squad. This is the direction he feels the club needed to take in order to create something more sustainable in terms of that rebuild.
Ratcliffe has high hopes of United becoming "the most profitable football club in the world" and ideally wants to see consistently good football stem from this.
Final Thoughts
Well, we finally having something coming out of the club other than from the manager, which is a good thing. However, some would say that what Sir Jim had to say was not so good 😬.
Three more years of Amorim?!
Nobody gave him a free lunch?!
THE GLAZERS ARE REALLY NICE PEOPLE?!
Bro, if you want to get the fans on your side, these aren't the things you should be saying. That last one, boils your blood, doesn't it? 😡
Ruben Amorim
I suppose it's a good thing he doesn't want the manager to lose his job but is it a way for Sir Jim to cover his own arse?
Amorim was their guy. He was the manager INEOS wanted and is of course, their first appointment. INEOS backed Erik ten Hag with over £200m two summers ago only for them to sack him just a couple months later. Ratcliffe even admitted that it was a mistake to have kept the Dutchman for those few months rather than sacking him after the FA Cup final which was what was the original plan.
Sir Jim is a smart man (obviously) and he won't want us to look at him as another Glazer in that they sack managers all too quickly and it looking like they made a massive mistake with that managerial appointment. He would want to show that INEOS are different and that the club are heading in a new direction, one that doesn't get rid of managers in no time.
This is why I feel they are desperate for Amorim to succeed. The INEOS Chairman has said on multiple occasions that Amorim is a top coach but in this latest interview, was the first time he admitted that the Portuguese needs to improve.
However, that timeline of needing three years to truly decide whether he was a success or not was also a first as we got said timeline. Clearly, Ratcliffe wants Amorim to work out as he is giving him every chance to do so with these three years and is also an indication that he understands that it won't be as quick a fix as we all might have hoped for, perhaps INEOS themselves might have hoped for.
Just going back to Sir Jim maybe wanting to be different to the Glazers with the whole sacking of managers thing, I wonder whether they truly did their homework on Amorim.
His formation and style is completely different to anything we've seen at United. This is the same system that is coming under so much scrutiny with many wanting him to change it to something more suitable to the players. Amorim has remained steadfast on his philosophy which is kind of the whole reason why he was brought in, at least that was the reason I thought we hired him.
I don't feel the manager was backed as much as he should've been. Yes, he got an entirely new front three and what looks to be an impressive prospect of a goalkeeper in Lammens although he's played just the one game, but why is that? Why has Amorim chosen to not use his new goalkeeper over a GK who is crap (Bayindir)? In my opinion, it's because he wasn't the right profile for Amorim.
I don't want to go into too much detail about the transfer window but I did do a rating of it with a complete breakdown as to why I gave it that rating.
Reports suggest that Amorim wanted Emi Martinez over Lammens and Ollie Watkins over Sesko. He wanted a midfielder to pair with Bruno and there was talk about a wing-back. If these reports are true, where are these players?
If Sir Jim really wanted Amorim to succeed or have all the chances to in his first season, which is huge for them all, then he had to back him a lot better than he did. I don't think they've done enough to help Amorim with his cause of wanting to be the manager 'for the next 20 years.'
I believe they more hoped that this new hipster manager which just make everything work regardless of the circumstances. That's how it comes across to me when looking at how things have gone.
With all that being said, I do agree with Ratcliffe when he says that the manager should be doing better. Amorim isn't helping himself with some of his decisions as this is just adding unnecessary pressure.
More on Amorim sacking himself here.
Due to such crazy decisions, will the manager even last those three years Sir Jim mentioned? Will he last a year? The INEOS Chairman might want him to but even as someone who backs the manager, I can't say that at some point (potentially soon) before those three years, I won't be calling for him to be sacked.
With the way he's carrying on, it's almost as if he wants to be let go of now!
It's also not ideal to be going from game-to-game not knowing whether this could be his last. I thought that Brentford might have been the final straw but alas, it wasn't. Amorim managed to redeem himself (sort of) with that win over Sunderland, but next up is the hardest game of them all as we travel to our greatest rivals and current champions Liverpool who while they could be there for the taking, will probably put in their best performance of the season because it's us and they're in desperate need of a win.
Paul Scholes also said that he believes Amorim needs to walk out of Anfield with a positive result: "Ruben Amorim needs to try and get something from Liverpool at Anfield.
This group of players are in such a bad rut that you have no confidence in them that they're going to get out of it. It's almost predictable that they'll go to Anfield and get beat."
Does Amorim have to get a result there of all places?
According to Sir Jim, it's a long-term project that could last three years so maybe not.
The other thing about this three year plan is that no manager post-Sir Alex Ferguson has actually had three years.
David Moyes had 9 months, LvG had two years, Mourinho had 2-and-a-half, Solskjaer was the closest to three years (2 years and 8 months) but was gone in December 2021 after being appointed permanent boss in March 2019, and ten Hag had just over two years.
The reason as to why they weren't successful was not only because they may not have been as good a manager as we would've wanted, but the club didn't back them properly. Other than ten Hag, I don't think the rest got all or even most of the players they wanted which obviously would cause them to be fighting with one hand tied behind their back.
Mourinho said one of his greatest achievements was finishing second with his 17/18 United side. We all took that as a joke but years later, we haven't really had a season like it and now we all know what the special one was talking about.
He also said things along the lines of "I keep saying this because people don't know what is going on behind the scenes", Mourinho speaking to beIN Sports in 2019 about the outside world not knowing what goes on bts at United [ESPN].
Earlier I mentioned how it was nice to hear from someone other than the manager. Jose comes into this as well. The special one that "in some club structure, you have to be the coach, you have to be the technical director, you have to be the communication director. Then you have to be the image that defends the club, the players", Mourinho talking to Fabrizio Romano in March 2024 [The Sun].
Amorim does have the structure but are they truly helping him, in some aspects at least? The manager is the only one who speaks a lot of the time (and he does speak quite a lot) so it would be great from time-to-time to take some of the media duties off of him and have someone else do it, like the CEO or Director of Football for example. Omar Berrada or Jason Wilcox can give us more of what's going on behind the scenes at board level and perhaps tell us some of their more immediate goals instead of things like the new stadium by 2030, 'project 150' in 2028 or this latest one of three years of Amorim.
The board is as inexperienced as Amorim in a way. Berrada was Chief Football Operations Officer of the City Football Group at Man City not CEO which takes on far greater responsibility while Wilcox was Academy Director also at the noisy neighbors, not a Director of Football which entails more duties than just looking out for the academy.
They are new at their jobs just like Amorim is a new manager.
With what we've seen so far, do they believe in three years' time that Amorim will have turned things around and we will be playing consistently good football as Sir Jim hopes for? Evidence would suggest otherwise.
Give him the players he wants and then there can be no arguments. Like this, the club will always be looked at as an issue more than anyone else.
I also don't think it's knee-jerk for journalists or anyone to speak negatively about United because we've been pretty shit for a long time, it's not just under Amorim.
As much as it is very annoying to see such news everyday in the media, we do give them the material by being as bad as we are. Take that material away and they won't be able to discuss United in such a way.
It's understandable as to why people are speaking in such a manner about the manager and club given the situation and even with Amorim, he's been at United for a year and it's hard to see much improvement. Yes a year is a short time but you would've hoped to have seen a little more from the manager and team at this point.
It's enough time to have seen something which doesn't make it knee-jerk.
There's also no time in football nowadays even more so at our club given how bad we've been for so long.
We need to be moving quicker than most yet all we keep getting from the board is about things in years' time rather than now. NOW is what we need.
It's very rare in the modern day that managers get a few years to turn things around at a club. Mikel Arteta is probably the only one who's had such time that Ratcliffe is talking about. He was also backed which is something I can't emphasize enough. THAT is the key to all this future talk.
Amorim also doesn't have three years on his contract. He signed on in November 2024 with a deal lasting until June 2027 which is 2-and-a-half years or so.
As I said, previous managers haven't had three years before they were gone. INEOS might be new but we know they don't waste time when there are people at the club they don't want (ten hag, Dan Ashworth).
I also take it that with this comment, Amorim won't be sacked this season. I mean, you can't say that you want him to stay for the next three years only to let him go after one. That won't be a good look for United's co-owner who came in with this monumental task of trying to turn the club around. They also did a deal to keep the Glazers which already had them on the back foot.
Surely though, that should things go even worse (somehow), they have to let him go before this timeline? It CANNOT continue in this fashion.
Staff Sackings
These were perhaps the hardest departures to see happen at the club. Whether they needed to be made or not, to know that regular staff were sacked rather than some of the playing squad let go of left a sour taste in the mouth.
Saying that there was a level of mediocrity, maybe this was because of the atmosphere created by the owners, which now includes yourself. Had this not been the case, maybe there wouldn't be that level of mediocrity.
The owners set the tone.
We know about all the cost-cutting measures but when you still keep players who are earning hundreds of thousands of pounds per week, it makes you wonder whether not getting rid of one of them would've solved these issues.
This has obviously painted INEOS in a bad light because even the Glazers didn't do such a thing.
Whether they could have or not, maybe letting go of staff wasn't one of the first major decisions you should've made? Surely they would have understood the backlash from this.
If not, then what type of owners do we have in charge? 😬
The Glazers
Maybe the Glazers are nice people, I don't know them personally, but in terms of how they've run United, they certainly are NOT nice.
They've shown little and less desire to actually try and improve things as they've displayed very little footballing knowledge with some of the decisions made.
Ed Woodward and Richard Arnold for example, were people who were more into business and rugby rather than have any experience running a football club. Woodward also helped the Glazers acquire United all those years ago in a manner that is no longer allowed and is a big part of the reason as to why United have all these financial issues in the first place.
That initial debt was £500m+ but has since risen to over £1bn with additional fees (BBC).
Nice guys my arse.
Sir Jim will probably be saying this because the Glazers are his boss. No employee will want to speak ill of their employer but this isn't the first time Ratcliffe has spoken glowingly about the majority owners. He said that "I only know Joel and Avram and they are, despite what you might read in the press, very nice people, very courteous and they are avid supporters of Manchester United" - Ratcliffe speaking to BBC in February 2024, when his partial takeover was approved.
I will point you to this post talking about the problem with the owners. I'm not going to go too much in-depth here.
But what we can see is that the Glazers have let the club rot since they took over. They were lucky with Sir Alex as manager for a while because he was a genius who could turn any team into title-winners but once he left, it was all down to them to keep the standard high, which they haven't.
If Sir Jim is the lifelong Man Utd supporter he says he is, then surely he would've known that working alongside the Glazers was a big no-no. United fans are quite divided on a lot of things but we all agree on the Glazers being the main problem.
Quite a lot to get into from the co-owner. I have left some things out but there is just so much and if I'm being honest, I didn't expect to have written as much as I did. It's just, when you're in the flow of things, one thought leads to the next and we end up with something more in-depth.
I do believe there are some good points but what do you think about Ratcliffe's interview, giving three years to Amorim and his thoughts on the Glazers?
Sir Jim Ratcliffe says Ruben Amorim needs three years to prove himself as Man Utd manager | Creator: Carl Recine | Credit: Getty Images Copyright: 2025 Getty Images via Goal