We expect coaches and managers to be megalomaniacs; it is something like a function of the job. We also expect them to be full-on pathological liars, emotional manipulators, self-absorbed bullies, and dictators, and in general people only appreciate them for that once they've been fired. Often because they are fired. It’s complicated. See Nick Sirianni for further elucidation.
So when we say that Manchester United's still new-ish manager Ruben Amorim is seeking out weird new territory, we're saying something. Amorim not only says this is currently coaching the worst Manchester United team ever (which is historically inaccurate), he also says that he is actively hurting the team (which might be part of the design). He is just eleven games into his tenure and is already blowing up the job, himself included.
We think this is unprecedented behavior, and we would be wrong. John McKay of the expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers was once asked about his team's execution in a loss and said in a famous response, "I'd be in favor of it," but that was largely a tactic to direct attention away from the players and toward his own sardonic comedic stylings, which is another bit of coaching best practices—for lack of a better term, we can call that emotional manipulation. "Don't look at them, look at me."
Amorim, though, is trying to select all the options at once, and is surely enjoying the gyrations of those who spend their days equating what a coach says with the reality of the position. He is trying to convince those who pay attention to Manchester United—and, lousy though it is, United is England's Dallas Cowboys in terms of media obsession—that the club is irredeemable in its present form, and that he is part of the reason. In doing so, he is covering all the categories at once.
This is an unusually bold strategy for anyone in such a position, let alone someone who has been on the job for only 82 days. "We have never been worse than we are at this moment" is not really new, but "and that includes me" very much is. Carpet-slagging everyone is not usually a persuasive tactic for current employees, and usually indicates that most of them will become ex-employees at the first available opportunity. Amorim including himself in that assessment is the interesting twist that suggests that what he is actually doing is less coaching than working the critics—a feint designed to get them to lay off by claiming to be worse than even the harshest assessments. You just don't hear, "I hate all of us, me included" from someone who wants to keep the job he just got.
It's a neat trick if he can pull it off, because he clearly views Manchester United's decade-long decline as a function of some combination of management bungling, athletic stasis, and historical drag weight. Thus, he is tackling all of it in a way that would be foreign to most American fan bases and ownership groups, who generally expect their coaches to talk up the brand in public while crushing the targeted victims within. The only alternative to that is the Belichick Way, which is not to talk up anything at all; it took a quarter-century to happen, but you can see how that played out.
Amorim is saying, "If this was any good, I wouldn't even be here, but I am, so what's that tell you?" He is burying everyone while knowing that he has the only shovel, making him in the best case the designated savior and in the worst case just one more victim of organizational rot. But it's still taking the initiative in attacking the public view of the franchise until he can clear out the roster. That is a very non-American way to deal with the spectre of the unthinkable, which in this case is relegation.
As we've said, Manchester United as it currently operates clearly stinks. Under Amorim, who was hired to right the ship, said ship has won only five of his 15 matches in all competitions, and the wingnut fan base (we know, we know, a redundancy) operates in a world in which stuff like this makes sense. Amorim has played lineups that make no sense to that fan base, said things that make even less sense, and in general operated like the host of an unhinged home restorations show in which part of the reconstruction plan is to make everyone else in the neighborhood move out. It's the rebuild of rebuilds, in short, and it will never be more fun than it is right now, while he's still placing the dynamite.
And Amorim can only do this if he believes his own bosses really want him to, which is its own hoot and a half. Owners tend to say "spare the brand," but United's owners clearly assume that their brand is unassailable, at least from Amorim's "We're Just Plain Awful" advertising campaign. American coaches do not seem to have that scorched-earth leeway, even as they're headed out the door for the next grim assistant coach's job. Nor do they have the imagination to employ the "we suck even more than you say we do" tactic, because they're too busy wasting time fighting the media to consider the alternative, which is to disarm them by agreeing with them. Nothing, in this context, is more confounding than a nodded head of acquiescence.
Anyway, Manchester United has at least 19 matches still to play, making the possibilities that Amorim can triple down where he has already doubled down increasingly delightful. He may provide us with the answer to the philosophical question that has baffled social scientists for centuries: Can you kick yourself in the groin and walk away in triumph?
