Ruben Amorim knew it would make headlines…and it did.
He called it – you could say “his”, but that wouldn’t be fair after just two months as head coach – Manchester United’s iteration “the worst in history” after another defeat at home, this time yesterday against Brighton & Hove Albion. .
Maybe Amorim wasn’t entirely serious, maybe he was taking it out on the media, because as bad as it sounds, the 2024-25 team is definitely not the worst team of all time.
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Whatever the intention, even saying it is bold. Who benefits beyond the headlines? The players won’t be raised (or maybe Amorim is asking them to own it and respond) and the fans will be alarmed (and maybe he wants it, just so they know the reality).
An excellent communicator, Amorim speaks like a man who has the absolute support of his superiors at United and doesn’t care if the players don’t like it, because it is his job to revive the club, root and branch, from ‘one year. zero imposed by the new co-owners of INEOS. United’s problems have been painfully repetitive, so fix the problems, fix the culture, fix the dressing room and endure the pain that comes with it.
(Stu Forster/Getty Images)
Amorim is making big decisions – he’s leaving out two of the team’s three best players – but he’s also relatively inexperienced at 39 and working in the world’s toughest league for the first time. His coaching staff is the same: they’ve never had to deal with a situation like this before.
Their careers have enjoyed a meteoric rise so far in Portugal, brimming with public and media affirmation. Not now, when surveillance is intense. Do they know what hit them?
Amorim sticks to a 5-2-3 formation (this is what happens with Diogo Dalot and Noussair Mazraoui playing out wide). If it works the way the manager wants it should work well, but he made a fundamental structural change to United’s squad mid-season and is using players who weren’t recruited to suit this system.
The individual players he has at his disposal are certainly not the worst in United’s history, but this East a poor, if sometimes confusing, team that is terrible at Old Trafford in particular.
This is United’s worst team since the start of the Premier League era in the early 1990s, but it is far from the worst in the club’s history – although six league defeats to home at this stage of the season is their best since 1893-94. Perhaps Amorim knows what he sees is nearly impossible to fix and is preparing fans for an even bigger fall through smart expectation management.
The 1988-89 season was a difficult one for United (Mark Leech/Offside via Getty Images)
The last time United were this low in the table – the right ranking, as opposed to one, say, six games into a season – was 1989-90.
I remember it well.
We launched a fanzine in the middle of a run which saw the team go winless in 11 matches between late November and mid-February. After 22 matches this season, United were 16th with 24 points and a goal difference of -4. United’s goal difference is worse than that today, but that’s it.
That 1989-90 team finished 13th, but won the FA Cup and then the now-defunct European Cup Winners’ Cup a year later. Most fans wanted manager Alex Ferguson gone in the early 1990s, but United had survived that moment – and Amorim talks about surviving that moment before the team could succeed.
United got out of this problem with several major signings during the summer of 1989. This is of course harder to do now, and their rivals are much stronger too.
They had also been mediocre the previous season, finishing 11th. There was no cup success to dispel the gloom in that 1988-89 campaign, but after 22 games that season United were sixth with 33 points. And on February 11, they were third. Then everything went wrong with only two wins in the last 11 games. Home crowds fell below 30,000 in the spring. Today, Old Trafford is sold out for every match.
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The end of the Ron Atkinson era in 1986-87 was also dismal.
United were 19th in a 22-team division after 13 games and dropped to second after new manager Ferguson took a point from their opening two matches in November. They also finished 11th that season and Ferguson needed four years to achieve success. No United manager after him was given more than two and a half years, and some lost their jobs for missing out on the top four. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was sacked in November 2021 after his United slipped to seventh place with 12 games played, months after being runners-up in the title race.
Worst top-flight seasons at Man Utd by win%
| Season | Final position | Earn % |
|---|---|---|
|
1930-31 |
22 |
16.7% |
|
1921-22 |
22 |
19.0% |
|
1892-93 |
16 |
20.0% |
|
1893-94 |
16 |
20.0% |
|
1914-15 |
18 |
23.7% |
|
1936-37 |
21 |
23.8% |
|
1973-74 |
21 |
23.8% |
|
1938-39 |
14 |
26.2% |
|
1962-63 |
19 |
28.6% |
|
1972-73 |
18 |
28.6% |
|
1919-20 |
12 |
31.0% |
|
1926-27 |
15 |
31.0% |
|
2024-25 |
??? |
31.8% |
We can dig deeper to find other inferior United teams.
On a purely statistical basis, the 1930-31 team remains the worst version of Manchester United that the English top flight has seen, losing their first 12 games of that season, something no subsequent team has ever matched.
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This team continued to sink after relegation to the second tier and was on the verge of dropping to the third division in 1934, and more recently United were relegated from the old first division in 1973-74 with 10 wins in 42 matches. .
There were inaccurate reports over the weekend following his death that Denis Law’s goal for Manchester City at Old Trafford last April had United relegated in their penultimate match. This is not the case, they were decreasing nonetheless, but there is a lesson from history regarding the law.
United lost their first 12 games of the 1930-31 season, including this one at Chelsea (Daily Herald/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)
Law signed for United in the summer of 1962 after a season where they finished 15th. His first year in Manchester was even worse, as the team dropped to 19th, three points from relegation.
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“No matter how we played, we just couldn’t win,” said team manager Matt Busby. “We played Leicester and Denis scored a hat-trick but we lost 4-3. I came in afterwards and said, “What do we have to do to win a game?” Just play the way we play and we’ll win games eventually.
He was right, but he had George Best, Law and Bobby Charlton on his team, rather than a crystal ball.
The outlook for United’s current crop looks much bleaker.
(Top photo: James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)
