Sporting CP’s Champions League match with Manchester City on Tuesday night is full of intriguing sub-plots, as manager Ruben Amorim prepares to join Manchester United later this month and his sporting director and close friend, Hugo Viana, prepares to join City in the new year. For an added twist, the pair’s wives are in business together running an interior design company, Dois Tons, and plan to continue their joint venture from across the Manchester divide.
But what was not expected this week was conflict between Amorim and the British media. You may have seen the toe-curling clip from Sporting’s press conference on Monday in which the usually jovial Sky Sports journalist Gary Cotterill demands Amorim answer him in English, with all the respect of an empire officer speaking to a local tribesman. Portugal, it might be noted, had an empire of its own.
Amorim attempted to disarm his aggressor with a smile. Sporting’s press officer chimed in: “He will speak in English next week.” Amorim self-deprecatingly apologised for his grasp of English (though it is actually very good).
Had Cotterill began with a polite request then he might have made some inroads. Instead, he sounded irate and entitled, accusing Amorim of turning “a cold shoulder to all your English fans,” as if Manchester United supporters were huddled around TVs all over the globe waiting with bated breath for their new manager to joust with Sky Sports’ lead overcoat.
Perhaps Cotterill was under pressure to get some clippable footage on a slow news day. Perhaps he was smiling off camera. But it all sounded pretty unbecoming, and ultimately needless. It is a 2hr 45min flight from London to Lisbon, and the question he came up with, the answer that needed to be heard around the world, was essentially: Did you know that Manchester United fans don’t like Manchester City very much?
“In English please,” Cotterill added in the most twattish tone imaginable, albeit finally using the word ‘please’. Sorry, no, said Amorim.
“Why?” demanded Cotterill. Amorim indicated that he was not being deliberately obtuse but that the Portuguese journalists would not understand, and he wanted to be respectful.
Sorry, he added one last time, before the metaphorical mic drop of answering in rapid Portuguese.
The suggestion was that Amorim somehow owed it to his new public. He didn’t. This was not the pinning down of Prince Andrew. It was a pre-match press conference for a non-consequential Champions League game between Sporting and Manchester City, held in Lisbon, unsurprisingly in the chosen language of Portuguese.
The interaction did tell us a little bit more about Amorim, though. His job at United has already become a circus and his calm, surefooted sidestep here suggested he is well prepared for the madness and the wild swings of emotion that come with managing a global behemoth of a club, especially this behemoth, one that has been stumbling in the dark for a decade with a self-fired tranquiliser dart hanging from its neck.
“Tomorrow I will be Sporting’s coach and only Sporting’s,” Amorim said in his native tongue. “I know they will draw conclusions from the result, but I don’t care … If the Man City result is negative, expectations will drop. If we win they will think that the new Alex Ferguson has arrived! What interests me is to win, a good farewell in Alvalade [Sporting’s stadium], win in Braga [his final game] and start a new adventure in Manchester.”
Over the coming weeks and months, Amorim will naturally draw comparisons with another former United manager, Jose Mourinho. He briefly went to study coaching under Mourinho’s wing at Old Trafford. And yet what is abundantly clear is that, bar the suave Portuguese aesthetics, their on-screen personas could not be further apart.
Amorim appears mellow, humble and graceful in his dealings with the media thus far. He kept his message clear and simple as the rumour mill went into overdrive last week, repeating the line that the two clubs were in talks and that everything would soon be resolved. He smiled and joked before giving his responses in an almost Lampardian light-serious double punch. Amorim has his own understated charm, and he will not arrive on day one to declare he is a special one.
That is not to misunderstand him as a coach. One of his former players, Bruno Simao – a childhood friend of Amorim’s – told The Athletic how Amorim wanted to banish him from the squad after he once overslept and missed training. Only the plea of his teammates saved his place. “This is his character and he’s like this with everyone,” said Simao. “You have no time to joke with the job. He’s really strict, but that is why he is a winner.”
Amorim’s signal of appreciation to the Portuguese journalists in the room – “if I speak English they will miss me” – illustrated just how important it is to him to stay faithful to his current job. He does not want to allow a slide of standards. Training has been as brutal as ever, captain Morten Hjulmand revealed when asked about life since the news broke. “We played three games and the coach didn’t give us any days off.”
It is all part of the same principle. Central to Amorim’s finale is the promise that he is still Sporting’s manager until he isn’t. He isn’t owned by Manchester United yet. He isn’t Premier League property. And he certainly isn’t at the behest of the English media.