Ruben Amorim, Ange Postecoglou and the death of the pragmatic manager

Ruben Amorim was aiming, without question, for defiance. He had just watched his Manchester United team endure yet another wretched evening at Old Trafford, swatted aside with contemptuous ease by Newcastle. It was a third consecutive home loss in the Premier League. It was United’s fourth straight defeat in all competitions.

Gary Neville was busy calling his former club the “worst team, pound for pound” in the country. Joshua Zirkzee had suffered the double indignity of being substituted after half an hour and finding himself jeered by his own fans. United soon found themselves sitting 14th in the table. The Athletic ran a non-satirical piece examining the consequences of relegation.

Over the course of several interviews that night, though, Amorim made it abundantly clear that he was not for turning. He was not about to lose faith in the system, the style of play, the set of beliefs that brought him to Manchester in the first place.

“I cannot change my idea in one day because we will lose much more now,” he said in a press conference. “I was here because of my idea and I will continue to do my idea until the end,” he told Sky Sports. He did not, he said, have much of a choice. “I have to sell my idea,” he told the assembled media corps. “I don’t have another one.”

That is the thing with lyrics: so much rests on the delivery. When Amorim uttered that line, it sounded like an expression of strength. It was intended to project certainty, conviction, an absolute absence of doubt. Plucked from its context, stripped of its tone, it could just as easily be read as an admission of weakness.

Amorim will have known, though, that is not how it would be received. It is now nearly eight years since Jose Mourinho sneered at the prevalence of “poets” in football, curling his lip in disdain at all of those managers and coaches who seem to place greater emphasis on their principles, philosophies and styles of play than on the actual business of winning games.

In the intervening period, Mourinho resoundingly lost that particular battle. Amorim is far from alone; pretty much everyone is a poet now. They are supposed to stand for something: a style of play, a way of thinking. They are thought of not just as coaches but as gurus, prophets, avatars for particular ideas.

It is not quite a joke to suggest that this can be traced to the way they dress. Managers no longer have two sartorial choices — polyester sportswear to denote virility and dynamism and suit and tie to convey sombre authority — but have branched out into turtlenecks, quarter-zips, and merino wool sweaters, the wardrobe of the TEDx talk.

That, after all, is increasingly what clubs want: not someone who will patch holes and fix problems and find whatever works for a particular group of players at a particular time, but someone who has an overarching vision of how the game should be played.

Massimiliano Allegri, the former Juventus manager, detected as long ago as 2019 that ideological flexibility was an active disadvantage in job interviews. His six Serie A titles and his two Champions League final appearances, he felt, were deemed irrelevant when he suggested to prospective employers that how he would play might depend on what players he possessed.

Instead, the polar opposite approach — the one best exemplified by Ange Postecoglou at Tottenham — has become orthodoxy. Postecoglou now no longer really answers questions about whether he will change his style of play given the injury problems that have plagued Spurs’ season, he simply refers journalists to his previous comments on the subject.

“I have been really patient the last 18 months sitting up here answering the same questions over and over again,” he said after Spurs’ 6-3 defeat to Liverpool last month, offering a somewhat debatable definition of ‘patient’. Like Amorim, he is happy to declare that he cannot conceive of an alternative. “I do not know what a Plan B or C is,” he said. “If people want me to change my approach, it’s not going to change. We are doing it for a reason.”

That reason, ultimately, is sound in both a sporting and an economic sense. Mourinho finished his barb by suggesting that “poets don’t win titles”, but that is not quite true. Most clubs want managers who espouse a particular philosophy because it works. Most of the teams who have enjoyed success in what we might as well call the modern era have been marked by a distinctive, consistent style.

Pep Guardiola’s golden teams at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City are the best examples, of course, but the principle holds true for teams who have only been successful relative to their weight: Diego Simeone’s Atletico Madrid, Luciano Spalletti’s Napoli and the many iterations of Brighton all play in markedly different ways, but their success has been aided by possessing a clear identity.

That makes sense. If describing a way of playing football as a philosophy is a touch florid, it does have obvious practical benefits. A coherent vision gives players order, clarity, familiarity; it ensures everyone knows what they are supposed to be doing; it streamlines recruitment; it offers a framework for gauging progress.

Crucially, it also gives the entire exercise purpose. The increasing reality of modern football is that most teams do not win. They certainly do not win trophies and, more often than we think, they do not win games. Tottenham’s win percentage over the last five seasons stands at 49.7 per cent. Spurs win just fewer than half of their games and, over that period, they have been one of the best six teams in the Premier League.

Trying to tempt fans to fill stadiums or take out television subscriptions with the promise of victory, then, is not just vaguely intellectually dishonest but asking for trouble; when a team inevitably fails to win, it is necessary to take on the costly business of starting all over again.

Far better, instead, to offer fans the chance to be part of something, to encourage them to buy into an idea, to feel as though they are joining their team on a journey: to see not only the players develop, but a vision of how football should be played, too. In that interpretation, the suffering is not proof of failure, but part of the point.

Increasingly, though, there are times when it feels like perhaps everyone has lost sight of the fact that while the destination might not always be apparent, there should at least be a destination in mind.

It is not quite fair to suggest that Amorim, Postecoglou or any of their peers refuse entirely to modify their approaches. As Amorim said after defeat to Newcastle, he “adapts for every game”. There are tweaks to the positioning of his players, changes to the way set pieces are approached, varied emphases depending on the strengths of the opposition.

And yet they are mostly superficial. The idea itself is non-negotiable.

For Amorim, that is his formation; for Postecoglou, it is his faith in his high defensive line; for Russell Martin, the former Southampton manager, it was the manner of his team’s build-up play. The core tenets of the assigned way of playing are fixed. They do not vary depending on circumstance. Postecoglou plays a high line even with no available central defenders, or when he has been reduced to nine players. Amorim will not bend even when his midfield consists of Christian Eriksen and Casemiro and is therefore wildly unsuited to his desires.

The theory, of course, is that the benefits will be seen in the long term, even if the timescale remains a little fuzzy, indistinct; fans would be forgiven for wondering if they might be on a journey that does not really have a concrete destination. It creates a context in which fretting about the short-term, caring about the outcome of a game, is considered in some way unsophisticated.

The journalist Stefan Bienkowski has called this football’s “post-results reality”: the phenomenon in which a manager can present a defeat for their team not as a setback, a disappointment, but actually as kind of a triumph, if you think about it, for how their side played.

“What I will say is the players are not wavering in their commitment to what we are trying to do,” Postecoglou said after watching those players concede six goals in a home game. “Even today, a difficult day, I’m really proud of the fact they still tried to play a certain way, knowing that is our way forward.”

Like Amorim, he was aiming for defiance. In a reality in which defeat can also be victory, it is perfectly possible to present what for years would have been seen as weakness and present it as strength.

(Top photos: Ange Postecoglou, left, and Ruben Amorim; by Getty Images)