Liverpool’s 2024-25 Premier League title run almost ended before it even began. Jurgen Klopp announced that he would depart the club in January of the previous season, giving the team several months to name a successor. Then-Sporting CP manager Ruben Amorim was identified as a candidate, with rumors at one point that he had actually agreed to a contract with Liverpool. But part of Liverpool’s reluctance to hire Amorim centered on his loyalty to his 3-4-3 formation, with the current team built for Klopp’s 4-3-3. The cost - whether in paying his $16 million release clause from Sporting CP or buying new players to fit his unique style - was too high. Thus, Liverpool hired Feyenoord\\\'s Arne Slot, who made a subtler adjustment to fit his 4-2-3-1 formation, and delivered a league title in his first season.
With that in mind, Manchester United should have known better before hiring Amorim in November 2024. Largely seen as reactive, the fit of the 3-4-3 formation in the Premier League was always going to be an issue, let alone for a club of United’s stature. Outside of team structure, Amorim didn’t help himself as he was seen as “too stubborn and too immature” to lead a club of that size. But you could argue Amorim was set up to fail from the beginning when he took over from Erik ten Hag midway through the season instead of having the summer to transition. Regardless of the blame, when Amorim was inevitably sacked 14 months later, he left with the lowest win percentage in United history in its Premier League era.
A day after Amorim was sacked this past January, Ten Hag announced that he was leaving management entirely and moving into the sporting director role at FC Twente. Ten Hag’s fall post-United was swift. He was infamously fired after three matches and less than ten weeks in charge of Bayer Leverkusen at the start of this season due to a difficulty in connecting with both players and the board. But it’s not as if Ten Hag lost his ability overnight - we all saw his credentials with his Champions League semi-finals run with Ajax in 2019. But the vision of having United play like the Dutch side was false from the very beginning.
“The football that we played at Ajax, we will never play here,” Ten Hag said, adding that his United would be forced to be more direct.
But didn’t his observation defeat the purpose of the hire? The goal was for Ten Hag to bring Ajax to United, not the other way around. And was Ten Hag’s two-and-a-half years at United enough time to ruin the reputation of a manager that Pep Guardiola stated could be “the one” who succeeded him at Manchester City?
The spotlight of a big club can refract a manager’s future in their own ways; it is soccer’s own version of bringing the darkness - the potential of a manager - into the brightest stage. Graham Potter was new Chelsea owner Todd Boehly’s first managerial appointment, brought in to bring structure and innovation into the club. Potter was sacked after winning just 12 out of his first 31 matches, seven months into a five-year contract. There were other traits of a big club, including the added pressure of spending over $400 million in the transfer window adding to an already bloated squad. There were threats against his family from poor results. There was a sense that Potter was always on the verge of being overwhelmed by the weight of the job; he described being “humiliated” by the failure.
“I don’t have any regrets over doing it, but, at the same time … there’s an element of frustration, anger, and maybe bitterness at some point,” said Potter.
Potter describes the “grieving” process after Chelsea, of not only failing but failing at that level. After taking two years off, Potter was hired and sacked by West Ham in less than nine months. A month later, Potter was hired by Sweden, where he lost his first match and is currently preparing for the playoff rounds in order to qualify for the 2026 World Cup. It is some distance from how we spoke about Potter before his move, of how he had a master’s in leadership and emotional intelligence, and how he pushed his players to perform in Swan Lake to stretch their limits.
There must have been another way for the Potters, Ten Hags, and Amorims to continue to develop as managers and not get exposed by the ruthless reality checks of global Premier League brands. But who is turning down United or Chelsea, even with knowledge of the inevitable ending? Whether it is the “smart” decision for one’s trajectory, rejecting big clubs communicates its own message about a manager’s value. Thus, the answer was to do the impossible and just win, regardless.
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Before Ten Hag and Amorim, Ralf Rangnick sounded the alarm that United needed “open heart surgery” rather than papering over the cracks with a new manager or expensive signings. Upon his hiring at Chelsea, Jamie Carragher presciently observed, “If I was Graham Potter, I would find it very difficult to believe they’re going to do things differently (Chelsea would end up moving the hiring process internally). And most recently, speaking on Thomas Frank parting ways with Tottenham, Ange Postecoglu highlighted the club’s “whole sort of environment of uncertainty.”
Considering those observations, exactly who was expected to succeed? Clashing with the position’s traditional cult of personality, the behind-the-scenes expositions reveal that not only is there no magic, but that a lack of clarity in infrastructure can actively damage the development and reputation of a young manager.
For his part, Amorim said he was going to maintain his silence over his United experience until the summer. And with credit still remaining from his Sporting CP success, he is currently linked with Benfica. As for Liverpool, even their data-driven approach to hiring Slot hit a snag as the Dutch manager admitted that this was his toughest season “by a mile” after struggling with injuries and the expectations created from spending over $550 million in the summer window. We revere the tacticians and attacking innovators, but the most difficult challenges can come from overcoming the internal structures of a club, and still having enough of oneself left to pick up in the aftermath.