The human side of ‘angel’ Ruben Amorim that set him on path to Old Trafford

Telegraph Sport travelled to Lisbon and discovered that United’s top managerial target once paid a struggling player’s rent for a year

There are many ways to describe Ruben Amorim. You could call him a former international player, for example, or a coaching mastermind. In the wider footballing world, he is regarded by most as the next manager of Manchester United.
Deritson Lopes, though, describes him somewhat differently. “Ruben Amorim is an angel in my life,” Lopes told Portuguese sports newspaper A Bola in 2020, when he revealed the extraordinary lengths that Amorim had gone to help him off the field.
The men’s paths had crossed at Portuguese team Casa Pia, at the beginning of Amorim’s coaching career. Lopes played for the club, but he needed help to support his young family. Not only did Amorim quietly find them a house, he also paid the rent for a whole year.
Sitting in the boardroom at Casa Pia’s stadium in Lisbon, club director Helder Tavares makes it clear that Amorim would never have wanted these details to become public. “He does not like people to know about it,” he says. “He took care of the players in their personal lives and made sure they were OK. He is human. He is kind.”
It is obvious that more tales of Amorim’s generosity exist, but Tavares has no intention of breaching Amorim’s trust by revealing them. After all, Amorim was not seeking publicity in 2018 when he arrived at Casa Pia, then in the third tier. He went there to learn, as part of an internship, as he made the transition from playing to coaching.
These early days of Amorim’s managerial career brought mixed emotions. He laid the foundations for success at Casa Pia, who went on to win the league title, but was effectively forced to walk away from the club due to the imposition of a bizarre set of regulations. Amorim resigned after the club was punished by the Portuguese Football Federation for allowing a “trainee coach” to give instructions from the touchline.
“He brought professional organisation,” says Tavares of Amorim’s brief but transformative spell at the club. “There was no money but, because of Ruben, Casa Pia played with a system, with tactics. Nobody was used to the tactics he brought here. It was different.”
Any journey into Amorim’s past leads to Lisbon. This is where he started his coaching career with Casa Pia, and also where his professional player had begun 15 years earlier. Amorim broke through as a midfielder at Belenenses, in the Belem district of the city, and spent five seasons there before joining Benfica.
Belenenses is a club steeped in history, as one of Portugal’s oldest and most storied teams (they were the first side to play against Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabeu). In recent years they have experienced significant challenges related to ownership issues, but in Amorim they have a modern symbol alongside their historical heft.
The club museum is stacked with trophies and medals, while Amorim’s teenage face smiles out from pictures on the walls. “Ruben is, and always will be, a significant figure in our history,” says Patrick Morais de Carvalho, the club’s president. “He is one of us. He has always respected and honoured our history. He is a well-rounded person.”
It would be reasonable to assume that Amorim was always destined for management, like so many other prodigious young coaches, but in his case that is simply not true. “During the three seasons we played together, there was not a single time that we talked about the possibility of coaching,” says Ze Pedro, a team-mate at Belenenses.
At that early stage of his playing career, it seems, Amorim was much more interested in having fun than preparing for the future. “In our second season together, we had a foot-volley court in the changing room,” Ze Pedro says. “We would spend hours playing against each other. The coaches kept telling us to leave.”
There are just five kilometres between Belenenses and Casa Pia. It is then only four kilometres from there to Benfica’s Estadio Da Luz, and a further six kilometres to Sporting’s Jose Alvalade Stadium. Four clubs in one city, and all of them crucial stepping stones in Amorim’s route to Old Trafford.
Amorim is 39 and has spent only three years outside Lisbon. His potential move to United, therefore, represents a significant challenge for him off the pitch, as well as on it, and it will be fascinating to see whether the former Portugal international can translate his charm from one culture to another.
“He has fantastic communication skills,” says Tom Kundert, a Portuguese football expert and author. “His press conferences are almost like a work of art. He is charismatic in the same way as Jose Mourinho, but his personality is the opposite. It’s not antagonistic or spiky, it is jovial. He answers questions with a smile on his face and is very open about why he does certain things.”
Such is Amorim’s way with words, he was reportedly nicknamed “the poet” by Cristiano Ronaldo during their time together in the Portuguese national team. In Portugal there is even a social media account dedicated entirely to counting down the minutes until Amorim’s next press conference. The account says it is “tracking the time remaining for the best moment of the week”.
0 horas, 4 minutos, 8 segundos pic.twitter.com/bDlgwWOkaI
Amorim became the manager of Sporting in 2020, after a short but successful spell at Braga. At just 35, with minimal coaching experience, his appointment was regarded by many as an enormous risk.
“In one of his first press conferences at Sporting, he was asked something like: ‘what happens if things go wrong?’” Kundert reveals. “And he said, straight away: ‘what happens if things go right?’ It has become a bit of a catchphrase.”
The similarities with Mourinho’s early coaching career are easy to find. Much like Mourinho, when he arrived at Chelsea from Porto in 2004, Amorim is young, cool, charismatic and able to captivate a room when he talks. Like Mourinho, he has enjoyed great success in Portuguese football, having guided Sporting to two league titles.
The two men know each other well. Amorim spent time with Mourinho in Manchester when on his coaching course, and Mourinho said earlier this year that Amorim is capable of coaching any club in the world. “I like him as a person, I like him as a coach,” Mourinho said in May, around the time Amorim was catching the eye of Liverpool and West Ham United.
Sporting is one of Portugal’s biggest clubs and the pressure on Amorim has been intense over the past four years. Nothing can compare to the scrutiny he will face at Old Trafford, though, and Amorim will know that more experienced managers than him have been overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the job.
If he does take the role, as is expected, Amorim will face a test of character as much as a test of his tactical skill. To travel across Lisbon, speaking to those who know him, is to hear about a man who is fundamentally, endearingly normal. The son of an accountant mother and a shop-owner father (his parents separated when he was one), Amorim has used that normality to the benefit of his clubs. At United, it will be tested to its limits.
A source who worked at Sporting at the time of Amorim’s appointment tells Telegraph Sport that the entire atmosphere of the club was transformed within a few months of his arrival. “It became much more relaxed, much more open,” the source says. “Ruben understands people.”
It is striking that so many people in Lisbon speak about his personality and character. This, clearly, is not a man defined by his tactical ideas – which are no doubt strong, given his success at Sporting – but by his compassion and humour.
At Casa Pia, they remember a coach who was “always laughing, always joking”. The club is near a small restaurant whose staff remember him with affection.
“He can make players work as a team,” says restaurant worker Gil Do Rosario, who struck up a friendship with Amorim during his time atthe club. “He never forgot how it felt to be a player, so he could make that connection to the team. He is transparent and faithful to his ideas. If Ruben said something, you could count on it.”
Perhaps the best measure of Amorim’s quality, beyond his trophies, is the reaction of the Sporting fanbase to his possible departure. At the Estadio Jose Alvalade on Tuesday night, as Sporting beat Nacional in what is likely to be Amorim’s final match, there was not even a hint of anger towards him from the supporters.
Instead, when Amorim walked out from the tunnel before kick-off, the stadium rose as one and gave him a standing ovation. It was an indication of his success on the field and testament to someone who has made such a powerful impact off it.