Amorim resignation alarm sounds as Rangnick the only Man Utd manager of six still standing

Ruben Amorim may well look at the fate that’s befallen five of his six Manchester United predecessors this summer and think twice about resigning. A post-Old Trafford future looks just as bleak.

After a quite extraordinary week at the end of a depressing summer for former Manchester United managers, while we’re sure Ruben Amorim continues to picture his calm and stress free life away from Old Trafford, he may now be wondering if – for the sake of his managerial career – he has to make this work.

As he rocked from side to side on the bench in the penalty shootout defeat to Grimsby Town he looked like a man who would rather be anywhere else, and the head shakes and frustration displayed against Burnley suggest this will be an international break of introspection for the United boss despite the breathing space that last-gasp victory has granted him.

After he reportedly had to be talked down from the ledge in January following a 3-1 home defeat to Brighton, when he told United bosses he was ‘prepared to resign’, there is once again a ‘feeling at the club that the head coach may resign unless results pick up’.

Reports suggest Sir Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS remain as staunchly wedded to their underperforming manager as Amorim is to his failing philosophy. It feels as though Amorim is closer to walking than being sacked, but we’re not convinced the nuance of his exit from Old Trafford will save him from a fate that has befallen five of his six predecessors.

READ MORE: Why the five post-Fergie Man Utd managers before Amorim were sacked

All of Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Michael Carrick, Erik ten Hag and Ruud van Nistelrooy are currently without clubs having been employed either last season, this season or both before being sacked this summer.

The most notable and brutal of those dismissals was Ten Hag’s from Bayer Leverkusen. The Dutchman has hit out at his ‘unprecedented’ sacking just two games into the Bundesliga season, while reports in Germany claim that the ill feeling towards Ten Hag at the club meant that sporting director Simon Rolfes had, if anything, ‘waited too long’ to get rid of him.

In a very familiar tale for United fans, Ten Hag ‘failed to convey ideas’ and ‘no-one knew what to do’, leading long-serving members of staff to mock him through open debates as to whether he was the worst manager in the club’s history.

Mourinho was shown the Fenerbahce door after they failed to get through the Champions League play-offs, though it’s claimed his sacking had been coming thanks to his uninspiring football and his increasingly public clashes with the club hierarchy over transfers.

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Solskjaer steered Besiktas to fourth last season having taken charge in January but was dismissed after defeat to Swiss side Lausanne in the Conference League play-offs on Thursday meant the club would not be playing European football this season.

Carrick was sacked by Middlesbrough after the club failed to reach the Championship play-offs for the second consecutive season, with four wins from four games to start the new campaign under Rob Edwards making that look like a very good call. And Van Nistelrooy was sent packing by Leicester after winning just four of 25 Premier League games last term having taken the reins after his interim stint at United

It offers Amorim an incredibly grim view of what his post-United career might be like and Ralf Rangnick being the only one out of the last six to have retained his job, as Austria head coach, suggests the Portuguese boss, praised for his honest appraisal of the basket case he’s in charge of, should go one step further and declare the need for “open-heart surgery”, as Rangnick famously insisted was a requirement to fix a football club which quite clearly remains broken.

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