Ruben Amorim must rebuild Man United from the ground up – here’s why the early signs show he might just have what it takes, writes IAN LADYMAN

Round the M60 motorway from the city, take a right and soon enough a left. Then it’s down the long drag down the road to Carrington. Past the new builds that doubtless weren’t sold with a view of the power station on the specification, past the horses sheltering under blankets when they really need wellingtons and onwards to the smallest of signs and the man in the hut by the barrier. Welcome to Manchester United.

It is always surprising how bleak the Carrington Training Centre can feel from the outside. The antithesis of what traditionally lay within. A place of hopes and of dreams and of fire and light but carrying all the outward charm of a nuclear bunker.

That was the way Sir Alex Ferguson intended it, of course. A place designed 25 years ago to keep the world out and the secrets in. To a degree it worked but even Ferguson – United’s most recent title-winning manager – couldn’t hold back time or shield the club he loved from the realities and cruelties and inevitabilities of sport.

So here we were again on this dark, wet, brooding Manchester lunchtime. Here we were doing this dance for the sixth time since Ferguson stepped away in the summer of 2013. Another new manager. Looking for answers, seeking solutions and, just maybe, starting that long scramble back towards competitive relevance.

Ferguson was asked for advice by the last Portuguese manager to work at United, Jose Mourinho. ‘Bring an umbrella,’ was his reply. Well, this was a day when it felt as though you may need two. And through the rain and the hanging mist that had been quick to usurp a morning of bone-chilling frost walked Ruben Amorim, 39-years-old and with a gait and a presence and a charm and countenance that appeared to suggest United may just have found one who knows what he is doing after all.

But, as Amorim was to remind us himself, United have been through the card over the course of the last 11 years or so and, for one reason or another, it hasn’t worked. He is just the latest to wear the uniform, the latest to try.

David Moyes, Louis van Gaal, Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Erik ten Hag. United, in their various modern guises, have tried every trick as they tried to recapture all that was so quickly lost, recruiting on the back of a bag of principles and ideas so mixed it wouldn’t look out of place on the confectionary counter at Woolworths.

One for the long-term. The great theorist. The one with a bomb in his briefcase. The home boy. The one on an upward curve. And they all failed. No matter how hard they try to rewrite their own stories, they all failed. And as they did so a great football club slipped further and further away from what it is supposed to be.

So now we are here. Amorim didn’t just walk into a media room on Friday or on to a training field for the first time here on Monday. No, he walked into a vacuum, a space emptied of all its might, its belief, its attitude, its confidence.

This is what prolonged failure does in football. It changes people and places and this is what a decade of drift has rendered at Manchester United. This is what Amorim must fix. The Portuguese isn’t tasked with mending holes in the roof. No, if this is to work it is to be a renovation from the ground up. United need to be rebuilt, reconditioned and repurposed. Better players, better coaching, better cultures.

And Amorim was impressive in regard to all of that on Friday. He spoke a little like a man who has already worked it out in a way that Ten Hag never quite did. Some of United’s modern failings are nuanced and complicated. They need some slow unpicking.

Others are really obvious and Amorim was happy to lay a couple out straight off the bat. Would he have allowed Marcus Rashford and Casemiro to go to New York last weekend? Unlikely, he hinted. Common sense, that. And then there was the football.

‘I think we lose the ball too often,’ Amorim said. ‘We have to keep the ball. We have to be better at running back. I think that is clear for everybody.’

On the one hand, it was Sunday League half-time team talk stuff. Keep the ball and run more. On the other, it will have been greeted by thousands of exasperated United supporters with a hallelujah usually reserved for the parting of the seas.

United have failed some of their managers over the years. The Old Trafford recruitment model has been riddled with holes. Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his Ineos team may well fix that. We will see. Equally, managers such as Ten Hag and others have appeared blind to some of the game’s most basic tenets. This is a big job and it is true that it does things to people. Moyes visibly shrunk. For Van Gaal it was the period of his career that informed him, cruelly, that even the best see the magic dust slip through their fingers in the end.

What this club needs now as much as anything is clarity of thought from the manager’s office. It needs authority and consistency and strategy. How do the modern United play? It’s not a trick question. We no longer know.

Amorim likes to go with a back three and he will do that at Ipswich when he starts his journey in red on Sunday. But United’s problems aren’t glued to formations or intricate details.

In the world of modern football, much changes. Sky Sports sat down with Amorim for the first time on Friday and sent a former United captain, Gary Neville, to do the interview. During Amorim’s written press briefing, a writer and friend of Ratcliffe hovered at the back.

A book is in the offing about Ineos’ time at the club. Ratcliffe doesn’t like a lot of things, it seems. But he has no issue with attention or profile.

Equally, much about our sport stays exactly the same and remains unaffected by the noise and frippery that can sometimes feel a little more important than it actually is. Ten Hag’s United, for example, fell apart on the back of a simple failure to value basic football principles.

‘As a coach you have to choose one way or another to play,’ said Amorim. ‘I choose always 100 per cent my way. I choose to risk a bit.

‘I believe so much in my way of playing. The players will believe too. There is no second way.

‘Maybe on Sunday you will see the starting 11 and not feel a lot of change, but you will see it in the game.

‘I think we have to improve the understanding of the game. I know it’s a different way of playing but we have to improve the physical aspect of the team.

‘I’m a little bit of a dreamer, and I believe in myself and in the club. We have the same idea, the same mindset, so that can help.

‘But I truly believe in the players also. I know you guys don’t believe a lot in these players. But I believe a lot.

‘We have room to improve. You guys think it’s not possible, I think it’s possible. We will see in the end.’

The best managers and coaches are intuitive. Amorim comes with a good reputation for management of people, albeit in a three-team league. On Friday he claimed he can judge the mood of a player just by watching him walk out for a warm-up.

There is nothing on his CV about water and wine, though. If he thinks this United squad has enough talent in it for the top four, he may be right. Any more ambitious than that and he may as well try bottling smoke.

He has assembled his own staff. Jettisoning Ruud van Nistelrooy was smart. And Amorim and his coterie of coaches will know what they see. Their discussions over tea at their current Lowry Hotel base and during their thus-far unencumbered walks around the city centre (that won’t last long) will doubtless have included some exasperation about how a wealthy Premier League club can spend so much money so badly.

There is talk of a move for the Sporting Lisbon forward Viktor Gyokeres. Other printed tales talk of a restricted budget. Who knows? But what would a move for another goalscorer say about the two – Rasmus Hojlund and Joshua Zirkzee – purchased for a combined cost of £106million over the last two summers?

These are just some of the wires to be untangled at Old Trafford. They say Ten Hag was too involved in all this and got his way too often. Much of the evidence of that is to be found on the extremities of the United first-team pool. On Friday, Amorim indicated that he wishes to be at the heart of the recruitment conversations, too, and it was hard to find much fault with his logic.

‘Everybody has to work together and for that we have to improve the process on recruitment,’ he said. ‘But I have to have a strong position on that because I am the coach.

‘I know how to play so I think it’s all together but the final word should be the manager. Not just because it’s your right but your responsibility. Because in the end, the result is on me.

‘I have to understand the league – that is important – and when everything is aligned we can buy and sell players.

‘I’m saying here it’s not the final say (that I need to have) but I have a great responsibility when we choose players because this is something that should be done this way.

‘I’m the manager, the head coach, so I have to choose the players.’

With a good luck text from Mourinho already received, Amorim was asked briefly to look back on a time when he came to visit his country’s great footballing icon at United eight years ago. He played along, while acknowledging that both he and the club are different now.

And that is one of the great mysteries and truths of United’s enduring decline. It’s hard to say exactly what they are now. A very big club for sure. One with enormous pull and power. But reduced so immeasurably by failings appertaining to the actual football.

This is what we mean when we say Amorim’s is a fix that must start on the ground floor. It isn’t that long ago that former chief executive Ed Woodward was telling people United’s time would come round again once the Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola dynasties concluded at Liverpool and Manchester City.

Well Arne Slot’s Liverpool are top of the Premier League and Guardiola has just extended his deal at the Etihad. Whether you deem City’s timing of that announcement as coincidental probably depends on how you look at life, but what is clear is that if United are to be successful again, they will not be by waiting for others to fall. They must rise.

When Mourinho first addressed the media at United he used the word ‘I’ 91 times. Van Gaal warned of conflicting commercial and sporting interests. Ten Hag said he hoped to topple the Liverpool/City duopoly. Solskjaer said he had asked Ferguson for advice.

As for Moyes – the very first one to try his hand at this – he sat behind a press conference table in June 2013 and said the word success may as well be tattooed across the United badge. Not for long. That chat took place at Old Trafford. In a bigger room. In front of more people. United did things with their chest out back then.

Now the club’s great stadium stands like a metaphor for their problems, overtaken and outshone by others who have thought smarter, acted quicker and spent more wisely.

The plan to rebuild that fading landmark is still in the grass. It will be some years in the execution.

Amorim’s repurposing of a football team must travel at a far greater pace.