The Poet

Ruben Amorim’s road to Manchester.

Drawing by Sammy Moody

Thore Haugstad
16 Dec 2024


In 2015, Ruben Amorim flew to Qatar to get rich and have fun trying. A year later he went home, shocked by his own behaviour. 

Qatar, he found out, did not suit his temperament. 

At 30, he was joining Al-Wakrah on loan from Benfica, a year after rupturing the ACL in his right knee. Amorim had never played outside of Portugal, let alone Europe, and he was prepared to accept whatever chaos came his way, of which there was plenty. He saw awful pitches, teammates who went unpaid, physios who never showed up. The club promised to find him a house, and he stayed in a hotel for six months. Amorim expected all that. What he could not deal with was matters on the pitch.

Amorim could never play at anything below 100%. Nor was he able to accept anything less from others. As his fragile legs galumphed around, fighting and scrapping, he spotted teammates who did not track back, players out of position, senseless decisions, tactical chaos. He even saw players chat and shake hands in the middle of a game—while losing. “It drove me mad,” he told Tribuna Expresso. “I couldn’t deal with it.” 

Acting on instinct, Amorim began shouting at teammates, rivals, and even his own staff. In one game he shoved an opponent. Another time he jumped into a tackle that nearly broke a player’s leg. “I’d never want to hurt anyone,” he said. “But I was so nervous and frustrated.”

In about 300 games in Portugal, Amorim had never seen a red card. 

In 10 games in the Qatari league, he was sent off twice. 

At some point he began venting his anger in Portuguese.

“You motherf****r! Pass it, you son of a b****!!”

His teammates would go, “Look, he’s singing!” 

“Nobody understood anything,” Amorim told the podcast Maluco Beleza. “It was incredible.” 

But as his teammates fell below his standards, he did too. He was out of shape, his knees breaking down, and the physical prep was far off what he was used to at Benfica. He crowned his season with a red card away to Al-Kharaitiyat, a dismissal that steered his team towards a 3–0 defeat. Al-Wakrah finished right above the drop and, though his friends advised him to stay, Amorim went home. “I was too stubborn to take the money and play along.”

In Lisbon, Benfica president Luís Filipe Vieira asked Amorim if he wanted to play on or retire. “I didn’t know if I could handle it, and I didn’t want to risk it,” Amorim said. In 2017, he ended his career at 32.

Seven months later, Amorim went on Maluco Beleza, hosted by Rui Unas, who asked what was next. 

Amorim: “I’d like to see if I have a knack for coaching.”

Rui Unas: “I think you do, man.”

Amorim: “Let’s see.”


At eight years old, Amorim was already a coach in the making. His grandmother would walk him to the gates of his private school in Alverca, north of Lisbon, where he’d organise games before the first class began at 9am. He was pointing and shouting, telling players where to run.

“He loves to talk,” his former teacher, Paula Abreu, told The Athletic. “When I see Ruben speaking on the television, I see Ruben as a child, the big smile. What he says is what he is.” 

Amorim’s leadership might have come from his dad, Virgílio, who runs a key-cutting shop in Alverca called Rei das Chaves—The King of Keys. His attention to detail might come from his mum, Anabela, an accountant. He dabbled in many sports—roller hockey (they put him in goal), biking (he nearly fell off a cliff), kickboxing (which he still uses to let off steam)—and his cousins Bruno and David Simão would turn professional footballers. Anyone who saw Amorim play might have figured that he had a chance, too.

Amorim played for the school team of his brother, Mauro, who is two years older, and one year they made the final of a tournament. The problem was that Amorim had a math class that clashed with the game. Amorim sat in the class, resigned to miss the occasion, when he heard a knock on the door. The teacher opened and there stood the entire team, begging the teacher to let Amorim go. The teacher said yes, they won 4–1 and Amorim scored all four. 

Though Amorim adored Sacchi’s Milan, the club of his family was Benfica. His parents would go to the Estádio da Luz, and for his birthdays Amorim asked to come along. At seven he joined the Benfica youth team, where players would cry if they’d lost to Sporting. When Amorim lost his first Lisbon derby 2–1, for the rest of the weekend, he was unable to eat. 

Released by Benfica in his early teens, he joined a string of local clubs, Virgílio driving him around in a blue Ford Transit. At 17, Amorim played the final 20 minutes of a game with a broken arm, and it had yet to heal when he had a successful trial at Belenenses. Just when he’d struck a deal with his mum to stay in school until he turned pro, he made the first team, who had preseason in the exam period. Amorim never took the exams, a decision he regrets to this day. 

After five years with the first team, Amorim rejoined Benfica in 2008. A German club was offering twice the money, he said, and when he turned it down, an agent involved in the talks put his hands on his head. “I signed for Benfica with my heart,” Amorim told Tribuna Expresso

That first season Benfica came third under Quique Sánchez Flores. They then hired Jorge Jesus, a coach from the working-class district of Amadora who had spent 20 years toiling away in the lower divisions. Jesus bombarded the players with a stream of corrections: “Close here! Higher! Higher!” He demanded that the players leap into ice baths to speed recovery. Marathon video sessions meant that when Benfica played cup games against teams from the third tier, as Amorim recalled, “we knew more about them than they did about us.”

Benfica 2009-10


Benfica immediately won the league, and the Jesus regime wore off on Amorim. He was also studying Sergio Busquets, Xabi Alonso and his teammate Pablo Aimar, to him the smartest player on the team. “He didn’t communicate much verbally,” said Amorim, who was in and out of the lineup. “Of course, he’d say things like ‘pass here, play there’ in training. But he communicated mainly through his movements, how he positioned himself, how he called for the ball. He just knew how to receive the ball, which foot to use, how to turn. I remember specific drills that Jorge Jesus introduced after Aimar, which I knew were inspired by Aimar … He wanted us to replicate what Aimar did.”

By now Amorim had become the dressing-room joker. Bruno Simão, who played with him at Benfica’s youth teams, told The Athletic that at eight, Amorim was already impersonating his curly-haired, mustached coach Fernando Chalana, appearing in the dressing room with his trousers pulled up to his chest. Now when Jesus was at UEFA meetings, Amorim would give teams talks in his style, a show even the staff refused to miss. There’s a Benfica TV video from a flight where Amorim grabs the mic and wanders back and forth down the aisle interviewing teammates, coaches and directors. Long before he held court in front of the press as a coach, Amorim knew how to present. 

Things didn’t stay good for long. Benfica came second for the next three years. In January 2011 Amorim needed surgery on both knees. The pain was so bad he could only train once a day. Frustrated, he often argued with Jesus. “But it’s like many others did because he is a coach who exhausts you,” said Amorim, who believed this was why Benfica bought and sold so many players every year. Nobody could live with Jesus for long.

A year after the operation, Amorim joined Braga on loan in a bid to find his old self. By now he was thinking deeply about all facets of the game. He was a central midfielder often pushed out at right-back, a versatility that enriched his tactical understanding. He knew a lot— too much—about rehab work. He was studying exercises, why they did them and why he kept getting injured. Jesus had shown him what a demanding and successful leader looked like. Planned or not, the pieces for a coaching career were coming together.

After a slow six months, Amorim scored a career-high four league goals as Braga came fourth. Rid of the pain, he returned to Lisbon, where he told Benfica president Vieira that he refused to work any more with Jesus. Only when Vieira insisted did Amorim return.  

Ten months later, Benfica won the domestic treble.

Amorim attacked the campaign hellbent on unleashing his creative side. There had been times when he’d been afraid to fail. “I regret that, honestly, but I think it happened because I was playing out of my natural position,” he told Tribuna Expresso. “I played right-back or even right wing at times, which didn’t suit my strengths. I was more focused on not messing up than playing my game. But in my last season at Benfica, I decided to stick to my position. I told myself, ‘I’ll play where I’m supposed to, and if I don’t, then I just won’t play.’”

Amorim got 37 games and felt he shed his image as the guy who’s always injured. He was even called up for the World Cup in Brazil. “The only year I played without pain,” he said. “That meant more to me than any titles.”

A few weeks after returning from Brazil, Amorim was playing on the artificial pitch at Boavista when he ruptured the ACL in his right knee. He was out for a year.

When his time in Qatar made him realise how angry he got at the failings of others, he did not want to go back to Benfica and get upset about his own. “I used to feel more regret, I was frustrated about leaving football so early,” he said in late 2017, six months after retiring. “But I’ve moved past that. If I had come back, who knows what would have happened? Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to perform at the right level, and it would have been very hard for me to be there for the sake of it. I didn’t want my image to change because, as you know, the last impression is the one that sticks, and I didn’t want to ruin that.”

He had decided to try coaching.

“Since I stopped playing early, I still feel like something is missing, and I’m trying to fill that gap,” he told Tribuna Expresso

“I don’t know if I’ll be good or bad at it, but I’m going to try.”


Two of the deepest interviews Amorim has given came in November 2017, when he was liberated from his duties as a player and unconstrained by a job as a coach. He said players can seem more stupid than they are because they have no freedom to express what they think. These days, he said, “a professional can’t even be browsing Manchester United’s Facebook page, because then people will say that he’s interested in moving there”. 

Amorim was no longer doing impressions. “I really miss the dressing room because, deep down, you’re like a kid in there. I only truly entered adulthood when I stopped playing football.”

He was still grappling with his temper, and shared an example from his last coaching class. “I asked a classmate to make a run off the ball when it was on one side, meaning he should enter the area like a winger. But the movement he made seemed incredibly basic to me because he didn’t think it through. The ball was played backward, and almost all defensive lines in the world would push up. He didn’t make the circular run to get in—he went straight forward, meaning he would have been offside. For others, it’s just a correction, and that’s what I should do as a coach. But for me, it was an immediate frustration, and I couldn’t hide it. It’s a problem that comes from being the kind of player who is always correcting.”

Amorim said that Jesus had influenced him the most. “There were many players who only lasted one season with him. I managed seven.”

But Amorim recognised the errors Jesus had made, above all in falling out with players. The more he learned, the more Amorim realised that coaches spend too much time on the physical and tactical. “You have to manage people,” he said. “You can have all the tactics and physical preparation in the world, but if the players’ minds are tired, or they’re not with you, it doesn’t work. The connection you create with the players is much more important.”

Part of that lesson came when Amorim spent a week with José Mourinho at Manchester United. The visit was part of a postgrad in high-performance football coaching at the University of Lisbon, which Mourinho had created with Antonio Veloso, a friend from his sports science studies at the same university back in the 80s. They wanted to teach coaches how to handle players and the press, an art few knew better than Mourinho, who had drawn on his mastery of communication and psychology for his early triumphs. At Carrington, the students mostly observed how United worked, but Amorim built up a close report with Mourinho. Where Amorim had enjoyed doing impressions, Mourinho has fancied himself as a decent actor. Both knew that if you want to motivate players, you must know how to put on a show.

Back in Lisbon, Amorim was one of the star students. “When we were doing tactical drills on the pitch all the other students were looking at Ruben’s and asking for his opinion,” Veloso told The Guardian. Amorim also studied other coaches. “When he’d be describing an idea he wanted to use, he’d say, ‘I took this idea from Conte, this from Mourinho, and I think they’ll be a good combination’,” Veloso told The Athletic. At the time, Conte was coaching Chelsea, who won the league with a rigid 3-4-3. 

Amorim admired Guardiola. “But I identify more with the other approach, thinking about how to beat the opponent and how to prevent them from scoring,” he said. Above all, he agreed with the advice Mourinho used to give coaches: Be yourself, because the copy is always worse than the original. 

“A football coach isn’t like an engineer where you do things in a certain way and it always works,” Amorim told Tribuna Expresso. “You need a lot of chemistry with the group you have. With one group, you might not have chemistry and get bad results; with another, you do the same thing and have great results. It’s all very subjective, and I think it has a lot to do with your personality. You can’t just make yourself up. I can’t go in and say, ‘I want to be the good guy. No, now I want to be the tough guy.’ It doesn’t work like that. You have your way of being, and that’s what you have to work with.”

What did he want to achieve? 

“My childhood dreams were to play for Benfica and Milan,” he said. “I achieved one of them. Now I just need to be a coach for the other.”


In April 2018, Amorim met the president of Casa Pia, Victor Seabra Franco, at a coffee shop near the Alvalade. They were a bunch of semi-pros in the third tier, and Franco gave Amorim the task of getting promoted.  

He lost his first game. He lost his second. 

He vowed to quit if he lost his third.

But Casa Pia won and began an eight-game winning streak as Amorim switched to 3-4-3. Some players saw him as an older brother. According to Bruno Simão, who played for the team, Amorim pestered Franco for better equipment, and if he refused to pay, Amorim would stump up the cash himself. When one player lacked the money to look after his kids, said Simão, Amorim paid his rent.

Yet Amorim was not a buddy. One morning Simão woke up to find his phone filled with unanswered calls and messages. He’d missed training. Amorim banned him permanently, Simão told The Athletic, and then his teammates pleaded with Amorim to give him a second chance. When Simão was allowed back into training the next day, Amorim gathered the squad. “You have your friends and colleagues to thank,” he told Simão. “Because for me, you were out.” 

Amorim wasn’t officially the coach. Since he was still pursuing his coaching licence, Casa Pia put him down as an intern to José da Paz. In January 2019, Amorim was charged by the federation for coaching without a licence. Casa Pia were docked six points and fined €14,000, while Amorim was suspended for three months and barred from coaching for a year. Simão says that Amorim broke down crying, feeling that people were trying to hinder his career. Even when the ban was revoked by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, Amorim resigned, saying that his stay could harm the team.

“I saw 10, 12 teammates crying,” the striker José Embaló told The Guardian. “I went to shake his hand and hug him, and he said: ‘I’m so sorry but keep working. You never know what life is waiting for you.’”

Casa Pia kept the 3-4-3 and got promoted but, according to Simão, something—or someone—was missing. “It was not the same,” Simão said. 

In September 2019, Amorim moved to the Braga reserves in the third tier. They beat Cerveira 5–0 in his debut and won seven of their first eight games. Three months later, Amorim was promoted to the senior post, and an adventure began.

On 4 January Braga won his first game 7–1 against B-SAD. 

On 17 January Braga beat Porto away.

On 25 January Braga beat Porto in the league cup final.

On 2 February Braga beat Sporting. 

On 15 February Braga beat Benfica away for the first time in 65 years. 

On 6 March Braga sealed their ninth win in 10 league games. 

Then Amorim got a call from the club he’d spent his whole life trying to beat. 


When Sporting hired Amorim, they risked the careers of three men.

Frederico Verandas had snatched the presidency after the Invasion of Alcochete in 2018, when a mob of 50 fans had stormed the training ground, attacking the staff and the players with belts and sticks, days before Sporting were about to play the cup final. A series of stars ripped up their contracts and the club split down the middle. One camp backed the president Bruno de Carvalho, another demanded change. “It was a complete mess,” says Patrick Ribeiro, a Sporting fan who covered the debacle for the website PortuGOAL. Sporting went on to win the two domestic cups in 2019, but the most recent season had been a disaster. 

Sporting had lost the Super Cup 5–0 to Benfica. They crashed out of the first round of the cup to Alverca, and went out of the Europa League against Istanbul Başakşehir. They hadn’t even won any of their five preseason games, the rot setting in during their defeat to Rapperswil-Jona, a team from the Swiss second-tier Challenge League. Sporting were now fourth, 20 points behind leaders Porto. The problems were even unfixable for Bruno Fernandes, who would end up the team’s league top scorer with eight goals, even though he’d left in January. If Amorim failed, Verandas would have to go.

Critics were also battering Hugo Viana, sporting director since September 2018. He’d broken through as a winger at Sporting in 2001/02, the last time they’d won the title, but as sporting director he’d merely had six months behind him at Belenenses before his arrival. “There were far more misses than hits,” says Ribeiro about his recruitment. Now Viana had gambled on a coach he knew from their time together at Braga. 

As for Amorim, many were asking why a club knee-deep in debt had blown €10m on a 35-year-old who’d spent 10 weeks working in the top tier. Amorim had not only played for Benfica; he adored Benfica. Now he was taking on Benfica and Porto, who had shared the last 18 league titles. Even Varandas sounded defensive when he said that “we hired a great coach, not a miracle worker.”

Yet as the press brought up reasons for why he would fail, Amorim said, “What if it goes well?”

Sporting first beat Desportivo das Aves 2–0 at the Alvalade, and then COVID struck. When the league resumed in June, they went seven games unbeaten. But the gap to winners Porto ended at 22 points, and when the transfer window opened, Sporting lost the influential midfielder Wendel and left-back Marcos Acuña. Hugo Viana and Amorim had work to do. 

Amorim promoted three academy kids —Eduardo Quaresma, Matheus Nunes, Nuno Mendes—while Hugo Viana bought the striker Pedro Gonçalves, and secured loans for Inter flop João Mário and the young Manchester City wing-back Pedro Porro. Sporting also signed Antonio Adán, the former Real Madrid goalkeeper whom Mourinho had insisted was better than Iker Casillas. Sticking to 3-4-3, Amorim put Pedro Porro and Nuno Mendes out wide, and drilled down a gritty defensive structure. By mid-January, Sporting had won 11 out of 13 league games. 

They also beat Braga in the league cup final. Over the next months Amorim played down talk of the title, while Sporting kept hitting late winners. In March, the moment came when he won over his last doubters.

Sporting were 1–0 up against Vitoria Guimarães on 83 minutes when Amorim sent on Dário Essugo, a 16-year-old from the academy. Fans love seeing young players get a chance, and especially those at Sporting, who remember Cristiano Ronaldo and Luís Figo. Yet rarely had such a young player been put on in such a crucial game. When Sporting had won the game, Essugo broke down in tears. 

Amorim used the occasion to propose to talents across Portugal. “This is a sign for all young players that, at this club, you will be given your chance,” he said, according to PortuGOAL

“That was the moment we knew that Amorim was the right guy,” says Ribeiro.

Six weeks later, Sporting beat Boavista to seal their first league title in 18 years. They’d lose their only league game in the penultimate fixture, a 4–3 defeat at Benfica, and as they celebrated the triumph, Amorim held the press conference with the entire coaching staff. 

How did they do it? Sporting scored fewer goals than Porto and Benfica, but conceded 20 in 34 games. Their unity and intensity had no equal. Amorim did not fall out with a single player, in part because Sporting stuck with youngsters who had few preconceptions for how things should be done. “I think Amorim did really well in picking out the players that he thought, “Okay, he lacks experience, but he's gonna be a sponge. He’s gonna take in everything I say,’” says Ribeiro. 

The striker Embaló, who played for Amorim at Casa Pia, told The Guardian. “He benched me for a game, so inside I would get so angry. But I didn’t show him. He called me to one side and he said: ‘Look, José, I know your feelings, but that doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about that, I really need you in this game, but coming from the bench.’ That was a change. I started to appreciate him more. He made me feel that when I was on the bench, I was more important than who was starting.”


Amorim was not able to defend the title. Sporting lost Nuno Mendes to PSG and finished on 85 points, the same total that had won them the league, with 23 goals conceded. It was still six points behind Porto.

Sporting did win the cup and got their first taste of the Champions league. They lost 5–1 at home to the Ajax of Erik ten Hag, yet wins over Dortmund and Beşiktaş sent them to the last 16, where they lost 5–0 to Manchester City. For anyone eager to build up the Mourinho comparison, Amorim’s results in Europe were nowhere close.

In 2022 the club sold a series of stars—Palhinha, Nuno Mendes, Mateo Nunes—and then slipped to fourth. They came third in their Champions League group. But Amorim never turned on the players. Thankfully so for defender Ricardo Esgaio, who was sent off against Marseille. “He’s not one of the fans’ favourites,” said Amorim. “But he is one of mine.” 

Amorim always knew what to say, especially when things were bad. According to The Times, Cristiano Ronaldo is rumoured to have called him The Poet. The Portuguese press never figured out how to tie him down. “He always comes up with the right answer,” says Ribeiro. “He’s not like a Mourinho type that will drop one-liners or anything like that. He’s more of a conversationalist.” 

There is a Sporting account on X that has counted down the time until the next Amorim press conference. “I already know what I’m going to say when I come here,” Amorim once said, according to the website zerozero. “I’m genuine in what I say, and when I’m not, you can tell.”

The next season, Amorim had little to apologise for. Led by the signings of Victor Gyökeres and Morten Hjulmand (no relation to Kasper), Sporting stormed to the title. They came second in their Europa League group, where Amorim tweaked his 3-4-3 after meeting Atalanta. “He’s pinched a lot of ideas in how they mark man to man, and press with more intensity,” says Ribeiro. 

In early May, the fans and the players gathered to celebrate the title. With a green and white scarf around his neck, Amorim addressed the crowd.

“They said we only win the title once every 18 years…”

“They said we only won the title because there were no fans…. 

“And they say we won’t win the title back to back…. 

He paused, and said:

“Let’s see.”

And then he dropped the mic. 

This season, Sporting won their first 10 league games, and then City signed up Viana. When the news came through that Manchester United had paid his €10m release clause, Sporting fan Andrew Duraes told the BBC, an elderly man broke down in tears outside the Alvalade. 

Just before Sporting beat City 4–1, the British press got to try the Amorim experience. According to The Times, Amorim strolled into the room and greeted three English journalists, then dealt with the critical questions and cracked some jokes. One reporter told him he was breaking hearts by leaving, to which Amorim replied, “My heart is breaking, too.” 

On Sunday 11 November, Sporting played their final game under Amorim, coming back from 0–2 to beat Braga 4–2. Then Amorim sat down with the press one final time. “I never thought I’d come to love Sporting as much as I do,” he said. “I understand that luck is very important in life, and I had luck that others didn’t.”

Some were criticising Amorim for leaving, especially mid-season. 

“I made some mistakes, but the team was always first,” he replied. “This was the only time in four and a half years that I thought about myself.”

Near the end, one reporter asked him what advice he’d give his younger self. 

“I’d tell him that everything is going to be okay, because at that stage, it’s difficult, and we have many dreams,” said Amorim. “I’d just tell him to relax a bit and that everything will turn out fine. Although deep down, he already knew.”

***


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