Ruben Amorim\u2019s decision to describe the Manchester United players as the \u201cworst team in the history of the club\u201d drew a public rebuke from Christian Eriksen, who said the remark added unnecessary pressure on a squad already under strain. Ten Hag was relieved of his duties after a dismal start to the 2024\u201325 campaign and Amorim was convinced to leave Sporting CP mid-season to take over as manager.<\/p>\n
Eriksen, now playing for VfL Wolfsburg in the Bundesliga as he heads towards the twilight of his career, criticised the timing and tone of Amorim\u2019s comments. \u201cThat didn\u2019t help,\u201d Eriksen told The Times of Amorim\u2019s remark. \u201cYeah, that didn\u2019t help at all. I mean, that was not… I don\u2019t think that helped the players at all. Some stuff you can say inside and it\u2019s not too clever to say outside, to put extra pressure and put an extra label on the players who were already trying to do their best.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think that helped at all, no. Then if he\u2019s right or wrong, whatever, but I think for us it was a bit of like, \u2018Oh, here we go again. Another headline.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Eriksen also reflected on Amorim\u2019s approach after arriving from Sporting CP. \u201cHe came in with his ideas. He tried to change things as you still see, tried to get it his way. Certain players for certain positions, for a certain style of play, that\u2019s how he sees success. He has to change a lot because the players were not used to that system. Also, historically, United always liked a different system.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd yeah, he\u2019s been very honest and also, yeah, honest with me from the beginning. Very, very, very honest, I would say.\u201d<\/p>\n
United\u2019s wider difficulties were also addressed by Eriksen, who noted the burden of constant comparison with past greats. \u201cThe main thing at United is just the perception of how you have to play and how you have to be as a player, because everything you do is compared to who was there before,\u201d he said. So any position, you\u2019ll be like, \u2018Oh yeah, now we have Casemiro but you have to compare him to Roy Keane,\u2019 or, \u2018We had [Robin] van Persie here, so this striker now has to be able to do this.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cSo everything at United is like straight away when you wear the logo, you bring all that history with you, you have to follow up what was there before and change that or make it better, which, of course, is almost impossible when you win [the title] eight out of 11 years in the Premier League.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo that puts a lot of pressure on the players and then, obviously, when you get into a situation where you change a lot of managers, a lot of structures, then yeah, it\u2019s tough as a player to really succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Eriksen says Amorim’s ‘worst team’ remark piled pressure on players and hurt dressing-room morale…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5456,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1083,969],"tags":[1012,256,1215],"class_list":["post-5457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-man-utd","category-premier-league","tag-burnley-style","tag-christian-eriksen","tag-controversy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}