This is an updated version of an article first published in October 2025.
Ruben Amorim’s reign as Manchester United head coach came to an abrupt end on Monday morning, when the Portuguese was dismissed from his post less than halfway through the three-year contract he signed upon arrival, not much more than a year ago.
As detailed by The Athletic, Amorim’s demise came amid tensions with various members of United staff, and after a 14-month spell in charge pockmarked by tumult.
Among recent permanent predecessors, only David Moyes took charge of fewer games, but if Amorim’s time in the dugout was shorter than most, then his departure came with something increasingly familiar at United these days: chunky compensation costs.
United will pay out around £10million ($13.5m) to Amorim and his staff, the consequence of cutting short a contract which was not due to expire until June 2027.
Amorim only took over in November 2024, doing so as one of Europe’s most highly rated young managers after a stellar four and a half years in charge of Sporting CP in Lisbon. United paid about £11m to bring him and his staff to Manchester. Four days after he was announced as their imminent new head coach, on November 1, Amorim’s Sporting hammered Manchester City 4-1 in the Champions League in his final home match in charge.
Their results under him were largely grim, but United had more than footballing reasons to bear in mind when considering whether or not to bring the Amorim experiment to an early close. Sacking managers/head coaches costs money and, at United, financial concerns have been a prominent topic since Sir Jim Ratcliffe acquired a stake in the club in February 2024.
For almost 27 years from the late 1980s, United didn’t need to worry about what changing their manager would cost. Sir Alex Ferguson’s lengthy and wildly successful time in charge ensured any problems tended to reside away from the Old Trafford dugout. Much has changed since his 2013 retirement. Amorim was that dugout’s sixth permanent occupant in the subsequent 12 and a half years.
All that flux comes at a price. Ferguson’s own departure, while plainly not a sacking, brought about £2.4m ($3.2m at the current rate) in costs to remove coaching staff not wanted by his successor, David Moyes. Just 10 months into a six-year deal, Moyes was out by the following April. Removing him and his own backroom team set United back £4.9m.
That was the cheapest of their recent sackings.
Louis van Gaal lasted two years in Moyes’ wake before his own ousting, with £8.4m the cost to remove the Dutchman and his assistants. Next came Jose Mourinho, whose December 2018 dismissal netted him and his entourage £19.6m (the largest managerial payout in United’s history). Ole Gunnar Solskjaer (£9.1m) and Erik ten Hag (£10.4m) hardly left for pennies either, not least because the latter was dismissed less than four months after United triggered a one-year extension to his contract.
The big uncertainty is Ralf Rangnick, who was appointed as interim manager when Solskjaer went, with a two-year consultancy role lined up for the German once that 2021-22 season ended. He never took up the latter position, but his departure in May 2022 coincided with a further £14.7m in compensation costs landing on United’s books.
Per information briefed by the club at the time, that £14.7m was not exclusively paid to Rangnick and his team. Instead, elements of it went on wider staffing changes within both football and non-football departments at United. The exact amount paid to the German and his staff upon departure is therefore unknown.
Even if we discount that sum in its entirety, the cost to United of sacking managers over the years stands at an estimated £64.9m. The exact figure will become clear when United next release financial information in a couple of months’ time, but, on its own, for a club of their stature, that’s not a huge amount: less than one per cent of revenues since Ferguson stepped down just over 12 years ago.
Finances could bear the early dismissals, too. United were profitable in each of the years in which Moyes, Van Gaal and Mourinho were sacked. It’s also hardly unique to United. Plenty of clubs, Chelsea perhaps foremost, have spent small bounties of their own on changing their manager or head coach.
Yet fortunes have turned more recently, with on-field inadequacies slowly but surely eating into off-field resources. The cost of Ten Hag’s departure was accompanied by the £4.1m United shelled out to remove sporting director Dan Ashworth after just five months in post. Taken together, the costs to remove Ashworth, Ten Hag and the latter’s assistants were equal to two-fifths of the costs incurred on staffing changes at United last season. When it comes to football personnel, one or two mistakes have a big impact.
United shed £51.5m from their wage bill in 2024-25, a big (14 per cent) drop reflective of 176 staff being removed from administrative posts, itself a 22 per cent reduction in headcount. Yet those football sackings ate up 28 per cent of last season’s wage bill savings, and came at a time when the club is still incurring the costs of its sizeable downsizing. In the first quarter of 2025-26, wages were down a further £6.6m (eight per cent) compared to a year earlier; the cost of removing Amorim has eaten up that saving and then some.
Other payments for loss of office and restructuring and redundancy have hit United’s bottom line to the tune of £34.5m since Ratcliffe arrived and while savings will be felt without the impact of dismissal costs in the future, it still stands that the club could do without expensive errors limiting the positives.
The flip side to the costs incurred by sacking managers and head coaches is the impact of continued underperformance on the pitch isn’t limited to that sphere. United’s 15th-place finish last season generated £136.2m in Premier League prize money, their lowest domestic takings since 2016 (the pandemic-affected 2019-20 season excluded).
No European football income this season is a contributing factor to United already projecting a small drop in revenues in 2025-26, at a time when rivals’ turnover is surging. Those projections include a minimum Premier League finish, too. Fail to achieve that and there’ll be another financial hit.
United were sixth when they pulled the trigger on Amorim, but plenty doubted the likelihood they’d remain there by season’s end. Whether replacing him will ensure they do so is unclear, particularly as their first game without him only yielded a point at struggling Burnley.
Whatever happens, United’s behind-the-scenes revamp has placed footballing performance as the key driver in their business success going forward.
For the second season running, the club has decided the eight-figure sum to remove the man in charge of that footballing performance is a price worth paying.
