In the early weeks of the pandemic, one question dominated the sports bulletins
of Portuguese newspapers and TV stations. Why had Sporting Lisbon,
struggling financially, paid Braga €10 million to sign their coach Ruben Amorim?
It was March 5th, 2020, and Amorim was 35 years old. He had only been a top-flight
coach for 10 weeks and on top of that, he was a former Benfica player and fan.
What were Sporting thinking?
Two years on, nobody’s wondering anymore.
What Amorim has achieved in Portugal is very significant.
Three Tacas de Liga and, in 2020-21, Sporting’s first championship for 19 years.
Speak to those who know Amorim about how he has managed to turn Portuguese football on its head
and they all point to one thing: his personality. A charismatic, natural leader, who team-mates
and colleagues wanted to follow. Amorim may have only been a good player rather than a great one,
but he left an impression on team-mates. He was the “joker of the dressing room”:
always talking, always entertaining, and always getting his ideas across.
His step into coaching seemed inevitable and Amorim shone on the High Performance
Football Coaching course at the Faculty of Human Kinetics at the University of Lisbon.
His first job came soon after, at third-tier Casa Pia for the start of the 2018-19 season. Amorim
hit the ground running there, impressing with the intensity of his training sessions. But with Casa
Pia at the top of their league, Amorim’s work did not go unnoticed, nor did the fact that he was
coaching without the required licences to do so. Casa Pia were fined and threatened with a points
deduction, Ruben quit, but the team he left behind still won promotion at the end of the season.
The next step was to take charge of a B team, and there was plenty of interest. He me with Benfica,
but Amorim decided to say no. Instead, he took over Braga’s B team and won
seven of his first eight games there. And in December 2019, when Braga sacked first-team
coach Ricardo Sa Pinto, with the team stuck in eighth, they turned straight to Amorim.
The first challenge for any new manager is to convince his players that his ideas are right.
This is how the manager generates “buy-in” and how, over time,
their ideas become those of the players too. This skill is maybe the most important
in management and Amorim has it in spades.
“Ruben is a coach that brings everyone together,” Paulo Meneses,
Braga’s Head of Recruitment told The Athletic’s Jack Pitt-Brooke.
“He has a very strong personality but, at the same time, it does not fracture the group. He is very
smart in human relationships and communication. These are Ruben’s strengths as a coach.”
Another source says the same: “His superpower is not the 3-4-3,
it is communication. With the media, the fans and the players.”
Even now, his players at Sporting watch his press conferences intently.
Ultimately, Amorim lasted even less time as Braga first-team coach than he did in charge of Braga B.
He was appointed on December 23, 2019, and left for Sporting on March 4.
He won eight of his nine games and drew the other. Braga beat Porto 2-1 away, Sporting
1-0 at home and Benfica 1-0 away. On top of that, in the Taca de Liga, Braga beat Sporting 2-1 in
the semi-finals and Porto 1-0 in the final. Five games against “Big Three” opposition, five wins,
all within a four-week period. And Braga’s first trophy in four years.
It's one of the most remarkable short-team improvements
any recent managerial appointment has produced.
So, when Sporting sacked Silas, six months into his tenure, they had a decision to make.
They could go for another one of the same old names. Or they could take an
expensive gamble on Amorim. All they had to do was pay the €10 million release clause.
No small task given their well-publicised financial issues.
Amorim’s first game as Sporting coach was a 2-0 home win against Desportivo das Aves,
their last game before the enforced COVID-19 stoppage.
When football returned in June 2020, Sporting went on a seven-game unbeaten run, pushing up to third,
but defeats at Porto and Benfica in their last three games saw them finish fourth.
But that spell did give Amorim the chance to try out some of the young players:
Nuno Mendes, Joelson Fernandes, Matheus Nunes, Eduardo Quaresma, Tiago Tomas.
The summer that followed also gave Sporting the chance to add more quality:
right wing-back Pedro Porro in on loan from Manchester City, former Real Madrid and Real
Betis back-up keeper Antonio Adan and former Wolves youngster Pedro Goncalves. One-time West
Ham United midfielder Joao Mario joined on loan from Inter Milan a few months into the season.
Even with these new additions, the squad was still not on the level of Porto and Benfica.
But it was enough for Amorim to work with. He knew how to bind them all behind his ideas:
a rigorously well-organised 3-4-3, which presses high and barely concedes any chances at the back.
“His playing style is clearly pragmatic,” Meneses explains. “He is a studious coach,
with a great capacity for work and a lot of intuition. He is contagious with his will to
win and with the conviction that only with hard work from everyone is this possible.”
And two things stood out about Sporting that season. The first was their defence.
Marshalled by the 31-year-old Sebastian Coates,
they conceded only 20 goals all season. It was, according to TheAnalyst.com,
the best defence in Europe, permitting an average of 0.73 expected goals against (xGA) per game.
The second point of interest was how good Sporting were in the final minutes of games,
scoring in stoppage time in nine of their league games,
winning themselves nine extra points in the process.
Perhaps the most important win of all came on April 25th. Sporting had drawn three of their last
four games and felt Porto breathing down their necks. They went away to an in-form Braga and,
after 18 minutes, had Goncalo Inacio sent off.
But they dug in and then, with nine minutes left, Matheus Nunes’ goal won them the game.
Three more victories after that won Sporting the title, to go with their Taca da Liga trophy
from earlier in the season. It was their first championship since 2001-02 and, after a generation
of Porto and Benfica domination, it felt like a transformative moment in Portuguese football.
And what next for the agent of that change. Amorim has been mentioned in connection with
the Manchester United and Tottenham jobs in the past, but he wants to stay put and keep winning
with Sporting. Only for so long, though, as the interest will keep gathering around
a coach destined to be one of the major names in European football over the coming decades.