Further and deeper into the jungle. Taunted by the quivering vines, mocked by the rubber trees, bitten and bruised by the asphyxiating vileness of nature. Ropes groaning, extras muttering, mud and rock resisting. Rasmus Højlund to Napoli, maybe tomorrow, maybe not. Alejandro Garnacho to Chelsea, maybe this week, maybe next.
Grimsby in the evening. Grim faces in the morning. Kobbie Mainoo wants out. Carlos Baleba wants in but is not going to go on strike or down tools; plenty of time for that once he actually gets to Old Trafford.
[ Ireland’s Darragh Burns sends Manchester United crashing out of Carabao CupOpens in new window ]
There will be suffering and there will be ridicule, and there is no shortage of parasites to feed on your corpse. A man on the radio thinks you’re a disgrace. An influencer in a padded chair is shouting “athleticism in midfield” into a webcam. Both are earning handy six figures a year for doing so.
The jungle plays tricks on your senses. It’s full of lies and illusions, the stench of disease, the ghosts of dead men, Nicky Butt’s latest take for BetMGM, Bruno Fernandes in a reconfigured midfield double‑pivot. Can you still tell the difference between the reality and the hallucination, between everyday life and the dream? Why haul a steamship across the jungle? Why bring the opera to Iquitos?
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But of course if you have to ask these questions, you shall never know the answers. Werner Herzog famously dragged a real 320-tonne steamship over the Andes while making his monumental, disaster‑strewn 1982 film Fitzcarraldo. Reflecting on the deeply troubled production, during which several crew members were injured and the shoot was marred by delays and screaming rows, Herzog dubbed himself the “Conquistador of the Useless”, a man driven by allegorical obsession and against his better judgment to see his pointless and morbidly outlandish vision into flesh.
Which feels, amid the collateral damage and human wreckage, like a pretty on-the-nose description of Ruben Amorim right now. No special effects, no scale models, no shortcuts; just a fever of warped dreams and misshapen feelings projected at operatic pitch. Amorim will outperform you. He will outrubber you. He will outnumber you all over the pitch. He wants his opera house in the jungle and will ultimately get his opera house in the jungle. But first, he’s got to shift Antony and Jadon Sancho and squeeze Amad Diallo into a slightly awkward right wing-back role.
Of course the tickling feather of ridicule has now come for Amorim himself. He’s a mad ideologue, an expensive folly, stubborn and inflexible, wedded to his doomed hulk of a 3-4-3 system, the last man on earth unable to clock that it isn’t working.
He keeps saying and doing stupid things. He plays with a little magnetic tactics board. He crouches on the touchline and wears trainers, which is not inherently ludicrous, but we can work with it for now. This has basically become one long endless bit, the gag that keeps giving, an entire arm of the football content industry deeply embedded in the idea of Manchester United being bad at football forever.
Against which it makes little difference to point out that United have quietly stopped doing all the things for which they were lampooned in the past: not having a defined identity, not having a footballing structure, throwing huge sums at ageing players on huge contracts. Whatever the problems were, they must now be the opposite: too much identity, too much structure, not enough proven quality.
Nor does it help to explain that Amorim’s 3-4-3 is not some stone tablet but merely the framework into which his tactical flexibility is built: allowing for a low block or an aggressive high press, short possession football or long diagonals, stuffing the centre or loading the flanks. Or that 10 months and two windows is really very little time to undo expensive mistakes made years before he arrived. Or that Amorim’s United have actually looked sporadically dangerous in their two league games this season. The fine details, after all, are largely irrelevant. What matters is the cloak of thorns, the constant needling, those sweet rageful feelings.
The 1-1 draw with Fulham – a very good performance marred by a missed penalty and ultimately hobbled by neuroses and self-doubt – was a kind of case study in seeing what you wanted to see. Two games in and already the takes are being thrown out of the pram. Ditch Amorim now. Ditch the 3-4-3. And then what? Another rebuild? Another period of crude adaptation, another coach forced like Erik ten Hag to compromise and lose a piece of himself in the process? Another bouquet of fresh-cut dreams?
Well, yes. This is what the United industrial complex has always demanded: more turmoil, more upheaval, more bloated failure and waste matter for the detritivores of the MUFC cinematic universe to consume. United can never simply be allowed to breathe, to brood, to be okay at football for a bit. Too much satire in this body politic; too much traffic to drive. We went into football media to tell the untold stories, find the hidden angles, and ended up surrendering to the numbers and leaning into United content in perpetuity. It’s not just the Glazer family that has been bleeding the club dry all these years.
The institutional decay is basically terminal at this point; the long-term finances abject, the ownership malignant, the happiness of today mortgaged against the returns of tomorrow and the cultural lucre of yesterday. The ridicule is endemic. The roof is quite literally falling in. The fan base, by small degrees, has been emotionally disengaging for the past decade. What remains? Who in their right mind can still believe in this?
In which light, amid which maelstrom, Amorim’s flawed and final stand begins to take on a faintly devotional quality. Perhaps he may even be the last real thing at United, the only person still taking this project at face value, the only one treating this football club like a football club rather than an asset, a cash machine, an advertising space, a content source, a punchline, a theatre of the absurd.
The jungle devours. The vines reclaim. The river always wins. The terrain is unfathomably hostile and every bright new thing must ultimately be strangled. Even the idea of imposing discipline and order on this rampant chaos feels like arch futility, a kind of category madness. Yet perhaps the futility is the point, a silken sporting vision to set against United’s hard corporate edges, a blanket of hallucinations that feels more real than the real. This is his mountain, his jungle, his steamship. And no opera house ever built itself. – Guardian
