When Ruben Amorim was shown around Carrington last week and given an insight into the £50m redevelopment that will transform Manchester United’s training ground, he would have given the plans his seal of approval. Amorim was talking about the changes required at Carrington as far back as 2018.
During his week-long internship at United under Jose Mourinho, while studying for a master’s in high-performance football coaching at the University of Lisbon, Amorim and his fellow students discussed the layout of the training ground with Mourinho and his staff.
It has been accepted for a while that Carrington needed major redevelopment work to keep pace with the quality of new training grounds built around the Premier League. The subject was high on the agenda again when Cristiano Ronaldo criticised the facilities on his acrimonious departure in 2022.
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Ineos is now attempting to bring the training ground back up to standards with a major redevelopment, which has led to the first team being relocated to a different building for this season. Despite the inconvenience, Amorim would no doubt have approved of the plans.
“We talked a lot about the functionality of the building and how they want to improve it,” said Geoff Labine, one of two other students who spent the week at United with Amorim.
“The layout of Carrington wasn’t seamless, and you were going back and forth to prepare for the training session. They wanted it more seamless, so you just enter and go from one section to the next. We spoke with the coaches about that a lot.”
That anecdote shows just how long the layout and set-up at Carrington has been a talking point for staff at United. That it is being rectified now suggests Amorim has chosen a good time to move from student to head coach at United, with Ineos stamping their authority on the club.
Amorim was one of three students from the 2017/18 intake of the master’s course to be selected for the internship under Mourinho, who was working at United at the time. He was joined in Manchester by Labine and Mohammed Bubshait, as well as Professor Antonio Veloso, who was leading the course.
They attended every training session during a week in late April as United prepared for a Premier League game against Arsenal, which they would win 2-1. Amorim, Labine, and Bubshait would report to Carrington at 8:30 every morning and spend some time milling around in the canteen before Mourinho came to see them.
They would then watch training, chat with Mourinho and his assistant Rui Faria and offer their own observations to each other before spending time talking over lunch back in the Carrington canteen.
“Jose and Rui would take turns working with the team so he would periodically come over with us. We were in the dugouts when it’s raining, or just on the side of the training field while the session was going on,” Labine told the Manchester Evening News from his native Canada this week.
“You could see he was talking to Ruben a little bit more than us. Antonio [Veloso] mentioned that they had already earmarked Ruben as one of the next good Portuguese coaches.
“So Mourinho was aware of that and was moulding him. He would with us about certain things, but also had some private conversations with Ruben. We would watch Mourinho do a couple of media sessions. Then we would debrief after lunch and maybe chat with Jose and his staff for a little bit.”
In the evenings, the students generally did coursework, although one evening, Mourinho invited them out to watch Champions League football together.
“We chatted about the course, and he would just talk about players that we were watching on TV, he would chuckle about this guy being the laziest guy you’ve ever seen on TV. There were a lot of great stories,” said Labine.
“It was neat being around him. There was definitely an aura. Even at Carrington, I just felt like people would kind of straighten up a bit when he walked in the room. You could feel the energy.
“He is a larger-than-life personality, so I think that’s maybe where they differ between Ruben and Jose. I think Ruben is much more diplomatic and approachable, not as authoritarian or blunt and straight to the point.
“Jose can be a little bit difficult to approach, you would always have questions at the end of the day or in our final goodbye, but I would be nervous to even ask my question because if it wasn’t a good one, you were gonna hear about it or he was gonna make a point about it.”
That wasn’t the only difference between Amorim and Mourinho. Labine recalls the new United head coach noticing that the players weren’t doing must post-training rehab or cooling down, they weren’t using ice baths that often and didn’t hang around long after training had finished. They were in the cars and heading away from Carrington.
He also told his fellow students that Mourinho was more rigid with his structure and that he would play a more flexible game.
“I think he had an idea for a system, he was already getting ready to do his coaching credentials, and I think he was already about to go and coach at Braga,” said Labine.
“People would bring up good ideas and good points, and he would listen to all of them, but I think he had a clear identity of what he wanted to do and what he wanted to try. He would have a couple of things that he would seem flexible on, but then, in the end, I think he preferred it this way.
“He’s pretty intense. He expects you to have a good understanding of the situational play. So when Ruben was running some sessions, if a couple of the coaches didn’t pick him up by the cue, he would kind of look over like, ‘Oh, you guys don’t understand the triggers for when this happens’, stuff that I guess that they’re learning in Portugal at a younger age when we had coaches from all over the world, so I don’t think we have the tactical intelligence at the level of Ruben.”
Labine remembers Amorim as an unassuming person, someone who didn’t demand his attention for his playing exploits. When they started together, Labine had no idea who he was until another student showed him clips of Amorim playing for Benfica and Portugal.
“He’s a really nice guy, very humble. He was very organised, punctual, very professional. He was very measured,” he said. “When he would give his answers, he would not take a long time, but he would take a second to think about it and give a very measured answer.
“Politically he knew what to say and how much to say but not to say too much. When we did media training sessions, he was obviously very comfortable answering questions and not giving out too much information, but just being mindful of what to say and what not to say.”
Amorim was in a WhatsApp chat with his fellow alumni from the university course, but when he got the Sporting job in 2020, he wrote a message to tell them he would have to leave the group.
Labine, now a coach at a football academy at a school in Canada, still remembers those days with Amorim and cherishes the pictures taken when the group left Carrington.
“Me and a couple of the other coaches still touch base once in a while and we reminisce,” he said. “The students and the players that I have, they get a chuckle out of the picture that I have with the guys and Jose.
“It’s just kind of been neat to see how Ruben’s progressed to be the next Jose. So I have a picture with both Portugal’s old and new. So it’s neat to watch him. Everyone knew he was going to be successful.”
