Ruben Amorim: How many transfer windows will it take for Manchester United head coach to mould his team?

football Wednesday 20 November 2024 21:32, UK

How long will it take for Ruben Amorim to mould a Manchester United team in his image?

It is the most obvious place to start but Amorim will be expected to turn results around quickly. There will be no honeymoon period.

Interim boss Ruud van Nistelrooy helped steady the ship with three wins and a draw from his four games in charge, and the Portuguese will be expected to carry that momentum with him into his opening game at Ipswich Town, live on Sky Sports.

Erik ten Hag was ultimately fired because he was simply not winning enough games and only Chelsea spent more cash on signings during his tenure; 70 per cent of the club's current squad composition was either signed or promoted by the Dutchman - only five incumbent managers have a higher proportion.

The new man must hit the ground running at Portman Road - and Van Nistelrooy provided the new permanent boss with something of a blueprint during his final game in charge.

The former United striker returned Bruno Fernandes to a more central role, using Amad Diallo and Marcus Rashford out wide with Rasmus Hojlund as the central focal point. Amorim is unlikely to break up the midfield axis of Casemiro and Manuel Ugarte, who have impressed as a pair in recent outings.

In the long-term, it is more likely that Amorim's biggest conundrum is over how to deploy the plethora of wide players in his current squad. Antony, the £86m misfit, is now fifth choice in his own position.

Rashford may have to adapt his game to playing more as an inverted forward - as he has done at previous times in his career - while Alejandro Garnacho could also see his minutes decrease if he doesn't adapt to Amorim's preferred 3-4-3 system, either as one of the front three or even as an attacking wing-back.

Amorim inherits a United side currently 13th in the Premier League after four defeats from their opening 11 games and struggling in the Europa League. So how long could it be before we see the club challenging again for the biggest honours? Let's look at some previous examples...

When Jurgen Klopp took charge of Liverpool back in October 2015, the Reds were 10th in the Premier League having won only four of their 11 games in all competitions under Brendan Rodgers. Rodgers had led Liverpool to second place in the Premier League in 2013-14, but that team had needed freshening up.

Of the side that played in Klopp's first game against Tottenham, only Divock Origi and James Milner - two utility players by then - were part of the 2019/20 title-winning squad. Roberto Firmino and Jordan Henderson both missed the game at White Hart Lane, but both would form an integral part of Klopp's Liverpool.

Joel Matip, Georginio Wijnaldum and Sadio Mane arrived the following season with Virgil van Dijk, Andrew Robertson and Mohamed Salah arriving over the course of 2017/18. Fabinho and Alisson were then seen as the final missing pieces to the jigsaw with Trent Alexander-Arnold having emerged from the academy.

It meant that heading into the season Liverpool finally ended a wait for domestic supremacy that had extended to 30 years, very little needed to be addressed in the transfer market. It took Klopp approximately eight windows to mould his side in his image with an incredible net spend of £68.7m over the course of that period.

Liverpool have ultimately been unable to sustain a stranglehold on the Premier League crown with Manchester City winning each of the six titles either side of Klopp's moment of glory during a season that ended without fans inside Anfield to celebrate the occasion.

But Pep Guardiola needed time himself to shape City from top-four contenders into champions. The first call the Catalan made back in August 2016 was dropping Joe Hart as his first-choice goalkeeper, but he still went through Willy Caballero and Claudio Bravo before he landed on Ederson for £35m in 2017.

City had scraped Champions League football the season before Guardiola arrived, but it wasn't enough to prevent Manuel Pellegrini from being dismissed having fallen a long way short of expectations. It could not mask the sense of deflation about how things panned out.

John Stones and Ilkay Gundogan were part of a £180m summer splurge to announce Guardiola's arrival but a year later, Khaldoon al-Mubarak insisted there was "nothing to celebrate" about finishing third and claimed they were disappointed to have ended the season without a trophy and well adrift in the title race.

The City chairman said at the time: "We've gone through several cycles over the last nine years and we're in the middle of one now but you can see where we're going."

Guardiola was given further financial backing to address shortcomings over that summer. Along with Ederson, the club lavished £43.6m on Bernardo Silva from Monaco.

By the time City won a much-coveted first Champions League in 2023, the club had recorded a net spend of £675m on players since Guardiola's arrival over the course of 14 windows.

Bukayo Saka played the entirety of Mikel Arteta's first game in charge, a 1-1 draw at Bournemouth in December 2019. The Spaniard could immediately identify, even in his teenage years, that the player had the quality and the character to build a team around.

Arteta insisted in his very first press conference that anyone who wasn't on board with his methods would be dispensed with - and the rest of the matchday squad from that trip to the Vitality Stadium have left the Gunners, albeit for a variety of reasons, and in the case of Reiss Nelson on loan.

A 3-0 home defeat by Manchester City earlier that month in front of a deflated home crowd, who were becoming more and more disillusioned, had emphasised the size of the task facing the new manager.

As Jamie Carragher recently pointed out on Monday Night Football, Arteta has taken different paths in a bid to find the winning formula at Arsenal, having only won an FA Cup behind closed doors and a couple of FA Community Shields to date.

Carragher identified how Arteta has moved away from recruiting ball-players to those with a more powerful profile, similar to how Jose Mourinho built title-winning sides.

"Towards the start of his reign in 2021, Ben White was brought in, a ball-playing centre-back, it almost felt like he was going to be to Arsenal what John Stones was to Man City," the Sky Sports pundit said.

This continued with the arrivals of Martin Odegaard, Gabriel Jesus, Oleksandr Zinchenko and Fabio Vieira.

Carragher continued: "Arteta then loses the league title again after Arsenal got bullied at Manchester City's ground towards the end of the season. And I think there was a feeling that Arsenal were not strong enough, not powerful enough."

Declan Rice, Kai Havertz, Jurrien Timber, Riccardo Calafiori and Mikel Merino have very different profiles to the players signed at the start of Arteta's tenure.

When Merino joined the club, he came out and said: "When I went into the dressing room, I felt like I was with a basketball team, not a football team, because of the size of all the players."

Arteta will hope he has now found the right blend of intricate footballers and powerhouses to end the club's 20-year wait for a title.

A big criticism during the Ten Hag era was that there was no identity to his United side and it was a mystery as to how they would set up from one game to the next.

The new manager must change that and provide a team with an obvious personality and defined character - preferably one that attacks and plays on the front foot. His Sporting team provided that, but whether this United squad will be able to do the same in his preferred 3-4-3 formation remains to be seen.

When the end came, Ten Hag will have cleared out his office thinking about what could have been had his players scored some of their first-half chances at West Ham in his final game.

That has been United's biggest Achilles heel so far as they have failed to make their dominance count in games. By the time Ten Hag was dismissed after nine league games, only Southampton and Crystal Palace had scored fewer than them in the Premier League.

Even in scoring three against Leicester in Van Nistelrooy's final game, the team recorded a modest xG of 0.76 so Amorim must find a way for his players to be more clinical.

There is no denying - based on the evolution seen previously under Klopp, Guardiola and to a lesser degree Arteta - that the present incarnation of Manchester United will be very different to the one that Amorim will have in mind for ending the club's wait to be champions of England once again.

Old Trafford has at times been beset with an air of toxicity since Sir Alex Ferguson left the club in 2013, aimed largely at the club's owners, the Glazer family.

Although Louis van Gaal won the FA Cup and Jose Mourinho had brief success, trouble never seemed far away. Ten Hag has added to United's trophy cabinet, with Carabao Cup and FA Cup wins, but dismal league form last season brought further anger.

The new manager has to turn around the atmosphere at the club under Ineos' leadership team and have everyone pulling in the same direction - and how he goes about addressing issues in his first transfer window will set the tone for his entire tenure.

Ipswich Town (A) - Premier League - November 24, live on Sky Sports

Bodo/Glimt (H) - UEFA Europa League - November 28

Everton (H) - Premier League - December 1

Arsenal (A) - Premier League - December 4

Nottingham Forest (H) - Premier League - December 7, live on Sky Sports

Viktoria Plzen (A) - UEFA Europa League - December 12

Manchester City (A) - Premier League - December 15, live on Sky Sports

Tottenham (A) - Carabao Cup - December 19, live on Sky Sports

Bournemouth (H) - Premier League - December 22

Wolverhampton Wanderers (A) - Premier League - December 26

Newcastle United (H) - Premier League - December 30, live on Sky Sports