Bruno Fernandes and his Sporting Lisbon teammates feared for their lives.
It felt like a war zone. In May 2018, 50 masked men invaded the club’s training ground, attacked players, the manager – Portuguese coaching legend Jorge Jesus – threatening to kill those they came across.
How had it come to this, a fallen giant of the game left bloodied by their own, on the eve of a cup final?
Those who were present are struggling to forget.
“There is a cancer inside Sporting, it can destroy itself,” Luis Martins, coach of Sporting B at the time, tells i. “It was like some kind of revolution. I could see them all coming through from my office. It wasn’t quite terrorism, but certainly was an assault.”
Fernandes and Rafael Leao were among numerous star players who cancelled their contracts. This was the final straw.
President Bruno de Carvalho was even accused of incitement, He was acquitted, but one source said he had a “totally broken” relationship with the players after suspending 19 of them following a Facebook spat a month prior to the training ground invasion.
Fernandes performed a U-turn and re-signed for Sporting once De Carvalho has stepped down a few months later. But relationships remained fraught, to put it mildly.
“The stadium was half-empty and aggressive,” Martins adds. “The fans who showed up booed all game. They want the president out, they want the coach out, the players are not good. It was so, so bad.
“Nothing got better quickly. Five coaches came in after Jesus in under two years. Then Ruben Amorim was next. Nobody knew anything about him and the mood stayed as bad as it was.
“That all changed quickly.”
Without sounding overly dramatic, Ruben Amorim and his team of coaches, as well as close friend and sporting director Hugo Viana, now bound for Manchester City, saved Sporting from itself.
A run of 19 years without a top-flight title, bitter rivals Benfica amassed seven between 2002 and 2019, just to add to the vitriol, was finally ended in Amorim’s first full season charge, with Sporting only losing once in the league all campaign.
The curse was lifted, fans returned en masse to the Jose Alvalade stadium, with the good times reaching as spectacular crescendo as Amorim’s exhilarating side, fresh off the back of another league title last season, gave Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City a footballing lesson few have been capable of administering in the new Manchester United manager’s final home game in Lisbon a few weeks ago.
The parallels are impossible to ignore. While Carrington’s security barrier is yet to be breached, the disgruntled masses around Old Trafford, themselves starved of a league title in 11 years, are starting to get restless.
Fortunately, even before he has turned 40, Amorim has built his reputation on transforming lost causes, each task greater than what came before.
Humble beginnings
“This is the real Portuguese football museum,” retired Casa Pia director Helder Tavares tells i, surveying his collection of artefacts with palpable pride, some dating back over a century. “Ruben used to come in here and chat all the time. He loved the history we have here.”
Still in his early thirties, Amorim had just retired from playing, completed a week-long internship under then-United manager Jose Mourinho while studying for a masters’ degree in high-performance football coaching at the University of Lisbon, and was looking for somewhere to cut his teeth.
“He lived nearby at the time,” Tavares continues. “So he asked if he could come and help out with coaching, we were in the third division as an amateur team then.
“Soon he was in charge of the team. He lost his first two games in charge, and if he would’ve lost his third he said he would quit. Who knows where he would be if we had lost that game.
“Then he changes the formation to his now famous 3-4-3, working with his two assistants he has taken with him to Braga, Sporting and now United [Adelio Candido and Carlos Fernandes]. Everyone bought into it because of how passionate he was about that style.
“We would not be a professional club now, in the Primeira Liga, if it wasn’t for Ruben Amorim.”
Just as Tavares is pointing out more incredible relics, explaining the origins of this remarkable club that is named after a children’s orphanage, where every club president in their 104-year history has been an orphan from that same orphanage, the club’s former photographer storms in and declares: “Ruben is spectacular. He used to joke with me all the time trying to get me to take his picture. What an amazing guy.”
And thus a theme becomes apparent from everyone we meet. Part of how Amorim brought Casa Pia to life is the remarkable relationships and lasting impressions he leaves on everyone he touches.
“We started at Benfica, me, Ruben and Joao [Pereira, Amorim’s successor at Sporting] and we are all still friends now,” childhood friend Pedro Russiano tells i. “Graeme Souness [then Benfica coach] got rid of hundreds of kids. Me and Ruben were two of those.
“I then coached against him when he was at Casa Pia. He was first in the league, I was in 13th. I prepared so hard for that game and we won 1-0. We still joke about that game all the time now. He is a leader, friends of player and has a truly amazing personality.”
Despite enjoying a successful playing career at a host of top clubs and on the international stage for Portugal, Amorim’s likeability belies the general view of top-earning footballers.
“We would catch him mopping the dressing room sometimes,” Tavares says. “He is also to this day still paying the rent of a player from here who was struggling.
“He used to go into retirement homes around here and give speeches. There was no money here for him, he didn’t care about money – and still doesn’t.
“The players were like his followers. They worshipped him. When he had to leave, even though he hadn’t even been here a year, many of them cried.”
Amorim’s time at Casa Pia was cut short due him being forced to resign following pressure from other clubs. The rookie boss did not have the coaching badges and jealousy struck because he was doing so well.
He was initially banned from coaching for four years, but that was overturned. His legacy where it all started, however, persists, with Casa Pia an established top-flight team now.
“It was the little things he changed to get us acting like a professional club,” Tavares adds. “He moved training to the morning instead of the afternoon as players preferred it that way. We had always trained in the afternoon.
“He changed everything here, forever. He still comes back, when he needed to do his coaching badges later, he did them here.”
Success followed him to Braga, where Amorim took a role coaching the B team before again, very quickly, making his mark in the top job. The relationship with his players again became an unbreakable bond, but his ability as a tactician started to come to the fore, taking another team punching below its weight up as few divisions.
“The moment I knew he was special was in the League Cup final, when we beat Porto,” Murilo, a Brazilian winger who played under Amorim at Braga, tells i. “It was clear to see his ability. Everything was well planned.
“With Luis Diaz [now at Liverpool] and Moussa Marega in top form, he knew how to prepare a very well thought-out defensive strategy. In such a short time at the club, he won a trophy.
“From the very first training sessions, he had the intention of implementing the same style of play at Braga that he had at Sporting. He had this idea in his mind: three centre-backs, two wide wingers with the physical ability to accelerate the play, attacking midfielders or wingers playing inside, creating space for the wide players. I was used as a winger or an attacking player drifting inside.
“Despite the short time we spent together, I liked his style from the start. At Braga, we were missing a coach who could bring back the pleasure of playing.”
Ten wins in 13 games with no defeats in the league, was again not by chance.
“It was the detail in our training sessions,” Diogo Viana, another winger in Amorim’s Braga side, tells i. “He paid attention to every little thing, from kick-offs – yes kick-offs – to defensive and offensive set-pieces, where his analysis of the opponent was extremely thorough.
“What he trained us for and said would happen in the matches… it always came to pass. With him, we felt a great closeness, like a friend we would give our lives for.”
Then came the task the great and the good in Portugal had tried and failed to complete, just over one year after he had been forced out of an amateur club for not having a coaching licence.
Sporting would pay £8m for a 35-year-old yet to fully complete his coaching badges, without a full season in any league under his belt. The sceptics had plenty to go on.
The impossible job
When i attended Amorim’s pre-City press conference, one relaxed figure in the row in front looked rather familiar.
It couldn’t be him, could it? In a white hoodie and jeans, the lethargic figure of Amorim decided to wait for the designated Sporting player, Morten Hjulmand, to finish fielding his questions, mostly waxing lyrical about his outgoing manager, before getting up and taking to the stage.
“He is very good at looking relaxed,” Russiano says. His mentor, Mourinho, taught him that, Amorim admitted later in the press conference. “But underneath, with Manchester United to come, he will be nervous.”
“The media here in Portugal love him, but it will be different in England. I saw pictures of him going out for a meal in Manchester in all the newspapers already – that doesn’t happen here!”
Amorim has not always been able to relax. Not when he walked through the doors at the dilapidated training facilities in Alcochete, which unlike Cristiano Ronaldo, Sporting’s most famous son who the facilities are named after, have not aged well.
Back then, everything was still on fire.
“It all comes back to that invasion of the academy,” Filipe Celikkaya, who was brought in to help Amorim rescue Sporting as B-team manager before undertaking a role with the academy as well, tells i. “A lot of players left the club because of it, so it was hard to build the structure again.
“The time came for Sporting to start again. We came prepared for everything.”
And so they did, starting from the bottom, up. Great preparation for what Ineos is trying to do at Old Trafford.
“In Portugal, most of the time, each young player works with their age group, but we said no,” Celikkaya adds. “We said if this guy has talent, he needs to work on the B team and make the B team as professional as possible.
“During the year, the B-team players would work with the first team more than 40 times on average. It’s fantastic because we see where they are at the moment regarding the first team and it’s why we had so much success. Just see how many kids during four years made their debut in the first team. It was a mission of ours.”
More music to United fans’ ears, given one of their saving graces in the last decade of decay is that the club have still had a youth academy graduate in the squad every week since 1937.
“Ruben came in and acknowledged the doubters. That made a huge difference,” Martins, who was assistant to Andre Villas-Boas at Tottenham, adds. “He said ‘I know I am not qualified, but what if I am successful, why don’t you just give me a chance?’ And it worked.”
Ineos insisted upon getting the right hierarchical structure around the manager in place before getting to grips with the playing squad. That meant recruiting a head coach working within the structure, rather than an autocratic figure.
Sporting would not have risen from the dead without doing the same.
“Ruben changed the club, it’s true,” Celikkaya, who played with Amorim at Belenenses and has ambitions to manage himself now, says. “But we changed the club as a team. It’s not just one person.
“You evaluate the whole process. It’s normal, only the first team appears on television, only Ruben’s face appears on television. It’s normal because he wins titles, but the work we did together on the second team was fantastic and elite level. Everything has to work well together, at all levels, for a club of Sporting’s size to succeed.
“It’s how you organise the process, who speaks with who, who does what. Now it’s easy to talk, but it’s so complex to do. It takes time. You need to find the right people for the right jobs. My objective was when I leave, I need to be proud of what we did, and I think I have that feeling. Ruben now has that feeling as well, and Viana will leave for Man City. He’ll have for sure that feeling as well.”
A decade after their main rivals, United do have a sporting director fit for purpose. They do have a vision that goes beyond one season. They also have no excuses left.
While he may be young for a coach, Amorim really is what Ineos is looking for. Erik ten Hag seemed like that modern head coach over manager they needed, but his addiction to signing former Ajax players only proved uncurable.
Amorim fits like a driving glove alongside Dan Ashworth, CEO Omar Berrada and technical director Jason Wilcox. The proper rebuild, from the ground up, can begin in earnest.
“When I was at Tottenham, United won their last league title. It is so long ago,” Martins adds. “I know it’s totally different, but the responsibility and also the kind of complexity they have inside the squad, the staff, management is very, very similar to Sporting,
“Ruben is not a big guy in the story. You don’t have big, but in Sporting he’s very clever. He touched the right people, and got everyone believing in him and what he was trying to do.
“Football is like that: clean the mess and get the results to change things. Manchester United are in very good hands.”
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