The Portuguese has been criticised for rotating his squad too much but he should assemble two separate XIs to cope with fixture congestion
"Rotation is a part of the modern game. It's got to be. Look at how fast the Premier League is and the intensity of the matches. The speed of the game has changed and somewhere along the line I have to make changes." Those aren't the words of Manchester United's current boss Ruben Amorim or his predecessor Erik ten Hag. They came from the mouth of Sir Alex Ferguson towards the end of a draining 64-game season in 2009.
Since then, the pace of the Premier League has quickened and the number of matches in club and international football has swelled. There has never been a greater need for squad rotation and yet changing players, either from game to game or during matches, remains hugely unpopular. Players want to be involved in every match, coaches want their best players to play every minute and so do fans. Just look at the reaction to United's 3-2 defeat at home to Nottingham Forest on Saturday. When Bruno Fernandes was taken off in the 75th minute for Mason Mount, there were audible boos from the Old Trafford faithful. And when the full-time whistle went to confirm a second successive defeat, fingers were pointed at Amorim for making five changes from his previous line-up at Arsenal, and for making five substitutions.
"When you keep changing players and you keep changing your back three and you take five players off, you're basically saying to all of them that you don't trust them," said Gary Neville on "All of a sudden you've got a completely different system, a completely different set of players on the pitch at the end of the game. You can never get consistency."
Amorim has warned on several occasions that he would have to rotate his team due to the sheer number of games and so that he can assess as many players as possible. And despite the negative results of the last week, he needs to keep doing it. In fact, the solution to the fixture gridlock he is facing is to go even further and mimic Chelsea by assembling an 'A' team for Premier League games and a 'B' team for European and cup competitions.
Getty Images SportLearning from Ten Hag's mistakes
Amorim was well versed in squad rotation at Sporting CP, when he was used to playing between 52 and 54 matches per season, and he has embraced the same attitude to team selection at United. In his second game in charge against Bodo/Glimt he made six changes from his debut at Ipswich Town and he made another six for the next game against Everton, when there was just a 64-hour gap between games.
It was the same for the trip to Arsenal, although he only changed four players for the game against Forest. Only three players have been resistant to the rotation and have started every game: Matthijs de Ligt, Fernandes and Andre Onana. It is a big change from Ten Hag, who named an identical starting line-up for his first two games of the campaign and made only four changes in the opening four.
For the Dutchman, three changes was a large number and one gets the impression that he would have rotated even less had he not had to contend with so many injuries. Indeed, Ten Hag was so reticent about rotation that during his first season he named an unchanged line-up against Real Betis four days after his side had been trounced 7-0 by Liverpool.
His propensity to keep a fixed starting XI in that debut campaign might have helped him win the Carabao Cup, reach the FA Cup final and finish third in the Premier League, but after a 64-game season in which many of his squad also played in the winter World Cup in Qatar, his players looked utterly drained. The load on the players can go some way to explaining why they suffered so many injuries the following campaign.
AdvertisementGetty Images SportPlayers need to be more 'robust'
Amorim's approach in that sense is refreshing. And it makes further sense given that many of his players did not have a proper pre-season campaign due to being involved in the European Championship and Copa America.
As former United defender John O'Shea explained to GOAL: “There's got to be more robustness built into the players. It’s hard because when these international players are going away to tournaments they’re not getting the chance to recover. If you have a four-to-six week window of proper training that base will serve you for the rest of the season but if you miss out on that you have to have that luck on the way to avoid little injuries."
There is another motivation behind Amorim's squad rotation. He needs to make every training session count as he looks to instil his methods into his new charges, and players who have played the day before cannot participate fully in a session the following day. As he explained in his first press conference: "It's so much harder to come to the team in the middle of the season because you have to get to know the players during the games, you are talking about no national team periods to work with the players, it's just games. It's really hard but we'll try to find ways to cope with that."
Getty Images SportMaresca points the way
And one way to cope is to look at what Chelsea have been doing. The Blues were on track to compete in the Europa League but United's shock win over Manchester City in the FA Cup final relegated them to the Europa Conference League. And manager Enzo Maresca has used the fact that his side are overwhelmingly the strongest in the competition to his advantage by fielding almost an entirely different team in Europe than in the Premier League games.
The Italian even took the bold decision to exclude talisman Cole Palmer from the squad for the group stage along with Wesley Fofana and Romeo Lavia. The policy has worked wonders in both competitions: Chelsea have won all four of their European games with ease and they have won eight of their last 12 Premier League matches to emerge as the strongest title rival to Liverpool, who are the only team to have beaten the Blues, along with champions City.
Maresca has also been flexible between competitions, making seven changes for the recent Premier League game at Southampton and still seeing his team win 5-1. He made another seven changes for the 4-3 win at Tottenham, restoring his line-up to the same 11 players that had beaten Aston Villa the week before.
Getty ImagesKeeping players motivated
"Pick an XI that you think are the best. Almost give that XI the faith and trust," explained Neville. "Maresca's doing it now at Chelsea – he's playing an XI on a Sunday or a Saturday and then he's playing a different XI in midweek. He's sending some messages to the players that there's stability here and this is what we're going to do.”
Maresca has also found consistency with his B team, and he has managed to give a new lease of life to players who would otherwise miss out. Christopher Nkunku has scored seven goals in six Conference League games (including the two-legged qualifier against Servette) while he has only started twice in the Premier League, although he is regularly brought off the bench.
Mykhailo Mudryk is also getting the game time he is starved of in the league and has scored three times in four matches. Benoit Badiashile, meanwhile, has used the Conference League games to map out a path into the Premier League team, playing 90 minutes in two of the last three fixtures, plus half an hour against Aston Villa. Of course, Chelsea's success in effectively building two capable and competitive groups of players has only been made possible by the £1 billion ($1.2bn) spent on 39 signings since the Todd Boehly-led takeover in 2022.
