On Sunday, after the 1-1 draw at Leeds United, Ruben Amorim held a memorable press conference in which he sought to clarify that he is the manager of Manchester United and not ‘just’ the head coach. One day later, Amorim is neither the manager nor the head coach of Manu. The press conference was probably the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Unlike some of his predecessors, Ruben Amorim was introduced as head coach when he was appointed. In the 2025 summer transfer window, the club made some big signings, which apparently led to discussions between Amorim, Jason Wilcox (technical director) and the scouting department. Ruben Amorim was repeatedly dissatisfied with the players who were signed and demanded a large budget and several reinforcements for the current winter transfer window. Football Finance Lab takes a look at all of Ruben Amorim’s predecessors (at least 50 days in office) since the departure of the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson and their transfer spending. Based on these figures, we want to analyse whether the demand for further spending is justified.
Before we look at the figures, we will explain the following chart with the figures. All figures refer to the term of office of the respective persons responsible. All figures were provided by Transfermarkt and compiled and analysed by Football Finance Lab.
It is interesting to note that Manchester United has spent approximately €2 billion since Fergie retired in 2013. That is roughly €160 million per season, yet Manu has not been able to celebrate the same sporting successes as in Sir Alex’s day. During the same period, city rivals Manchester City spent around €350 million more and celebrated numerous titles, including a Champions League victory and seven English championships. One might think that this is because United had to generate large revenues on the transfer market to offset these expenses, but the transfer balance shows a deficit of around €1.5 billion during this period.
If we now look at the total expenditure during each manager’s tenure, Ruben Amorim is in second-to-last place. Jose Mourinho spent the most money during his time at Manu, with €466.1 million. He is closely followed by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Erik Ten Haag, with approximately €462 million and €453 million respectively. Louis van Gaal is also ahead of Amorim with around €351 million. Only David Moyes is behind Ruben Amorim with just €77 million. Ralf Rangnick was not allowed to make any expenditures during his brief interlude and is only included in the table for the sake of completeness. At first glance, it therefore appears that Amorim’s call for more investment is justified.
Average expenditure: Amorim on the first place
But let’s now look at the average expenditure per transfer window. Here, Amorim suddenly finds himself in first place by a wide margin. During his tenure, he only had two transfer windows. In his first winter, he was only able to spend around €32 million, mainly on Patrick Dorgu. So, a total of €250 million was spent on strengthening Amorim’s squad in his first and only ‘real’ transfer window. That’s an average of around €141 million per transfer window. In second and third place are Jose Mourinho and Erik Ten Haag with €93.2 million and €90.7 million per transfer window respectively. Although Solskjaer is in second place in terms of cumulative transfer spending, he is well behind Louis van Gaal and the other two managers mentioned. He spent approximately €77 million per transfer window during his tenure and had the most transfer windows of any manager during their respective tenures, with a total of six. David Moyes is once again in last place, having spent approximately €38 million in his two transfer windows.
Let us now look at the transfer balance achieved by the respective managers. All of them have a negative transfer balance. David Moyes has the best balance at -75 million euros. Louis van Gaal and Ruben Amorim follow with -203 and -208 million euros. Erik Ten Haag has the weakest balance with approximately -403 million euros. If we now look again at the transfer balance per transfer window, Amorim is in last place with a balance of -104 million euros per transfer window. David Moyes also has the best balance here with only -37 million euros per transfer window. It is also interesting to note that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer only has a deficit of €54 million, while Jose Mourinho, with almost the same expenditure, has a deficit of €70 million per transfer window. However, this is not due to Ole’s sales skills, but rather to the number of transfer windows, where Solskjaer had one more than Mourinho. The overall balance was -350 million euros for Mourinho and -324 million euros for Solskjaer.
One final interesting comparison we can make is between the tenures of David Moyes and Ruben Amorim. Both have been on the sidelines for a comparable number of games (51/63 games). Both also had two transfer windows under their responsibility, yet Ruben Amorim’s time at Manchester United saw approximately 3.6 times more spent than during David Moyes’ tenure. Moyes also earned 0.3 more points per game. The sums involved have, of course, risen in general in football over the last 12 years, which is the time between the two tenures, but this article aims to show that a lot of money was spent on Ruben Amorim’s team compared to his predecessors. This reinforces the impression that the dismissal came about because Amorim was dissatisfied with the work of the scouting department and the lack of competence in bringing in his desired players.