Coaches and managers have a tenuous relationship with the veracity of the spoken word, which is to say that when they speak in public, they are generally either lying or setting up their next lie. Frankness rarely serves them well in any context, which is why they avoid it like a pair of anthrax-infused burlap compression shorts. Everything is a message meant for someone else—to confound or mislead opponents, to placate a dungheaded boss, to motivate a slothful player—and the public exists mostly as a conduit through which that message can find its intended target.
And then there's Ruben Amorim, currently having his pants filled daily with red ants as the coach at Manchester United. He finds his inherited team perpetually irksome and clearly cannot wait for the offseason when he can remake it in his tactical image and likeness. This is not speculation, to be clear. It was obvious from the middle of January, when Amorim said this might be the worst Manchester United team of all time. I mean, that's prime talk-show stuff right there, and until United either gets better or fire him, it will have a resonance that rivals Bill Parcells's "You are what your record says you are," or Jim Mora's "Playoffs? Playoffs?"
But that was merely preamble. Amorim dropped what may be his most enduring gem Saturday after the Red Devils rallied from 2-0 down to draw with resurgent Everton. United had done almost nothing in the first half, a pernicious habit that preceded Amorim’s arrival and remains true even today. When asked about it after the game, Amorim went all metaphysical.
"We did not exist in the first half," he said. Jesus in a parka, that's cold.
Even the old line credited to Tampa Bay Bucs coach John McKay when asked about his team's execution after a loss—"I'm in favor of it"—still acknowledged the fact that his players were living on the three-dimensional plane, even if he didn't acknowledge that he stole the line from Groucho Marx from 40 years earlier, who stole it from another source 40 years before that. For a coach to cheerfully endorse his current team’s eradication as prep for whatever is supposed to come next, he must first acknowledge that the team exists. Amorim views that team’s place in the universe as merely an intermediate step.
Which frankly fits here. Amorim needed only 15 games in his new billet before he declared that his might be the worst Manchester United team ever. He clearly cannot wait for a full summer to begin the cleanout that his employers evidently desire, and rallying from two goals down to gain a draw with a team this close to administrative relegation was insufficiently inspiring relative to the prospect of the cleansing flood to come. United has won only nine of Amorim's first 22 matches (with four draws), and rest in a disquieting 15th (out of 20). They're not in danger of relegation only because the teams below them turbo-suck, but the team's history is still holding them under the jets of the hot tub. Between that and massive cost-cutting measures by new supervising owner/ass-fez Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the entire United vibe is a total depress-o-thon.
But we're not here to explain Manchester United to you; there's an entire global radio/streaming network (TalkSport) devoted almost singularly to that subject and any number of team-centric podcasts and web sites doing the same. Manchester United is the Dallas Cowboys on Adderall, in both the qualitative and pejorative sense—rich, fascinating, busy, bad. But we are here merely to admire those four words, "We. Did. Not. Exist." So utterly comprehensive in contempt—so, well, existential.
"We did not exist." Say it aloud. Notice that the temperature in the room you're in just dropped to meat-locker conditions.
English is not Amorim's first language, but not by much. He speaks and understands it better than most of you, though that may be a low bar being cleared. "We did not exist" is a statement about the team's first half inertia, but in a world in which such a great percentage of any coach's quotes are just ear wax, WDNE is the most withering analysis one can offer on anything because it challenges the very notion of being. Unlike such boilerplate lines like "We were overmatched" or "We weren't ready to play" or even the dated but still magnificent "We were horseshit," WDNE does not even allow the presumption of a corporeal state. As even the most tepid of Marvel Cinematic Universe scripts will attest, nonexistence is the ultimate dealbreaker.
It makes us wonder, in the end, if any of the new American coaches hired since the end of the NFL and college football seasons could approach it, let alone top it. And how would it be topped? "We never existed?" "We perform only in an alternate universe?" "I'm sorry, what is this thing you seem to be referring to?" "Who are you?" "Who am I?" The mind melts.
Whatever success he will or will not enjoy in his job, Amorim has already raised the rhetorical bar to impossible levels over the final 15 matches of the season, assuming he isn't fired in a fit of impatience. Unless he can begin the 2025-26 season convincing the rest of the planet that his first 37 games on the job never actually happened at all, he may have already peaked as a spokesman for the cauldron of mess he supervises. At least, we think he supervises it. He may just be another baffled observer. As we have just learned by extension of Manchester United's place in the time-space continuum, we may not exist either. Given the last five weeks, that is at worst a wash.
