WHEN you strip away all the emotion of the night in Bilbao and both managers Ange Postecoglou and Ruben Amorim allegedly on the brink of losing their jobs – both swaying between hero status and clownship – the game was a stark reminder of the poor state of top-level football.
The Europa League (formerly the UEFA Cup) used to be a brilliant, high-quality competition.
Inter Milan, Parma, Sevilla and Napoli all left indelible marks on the secondary European club competition over the years with little between them and the so-called better clubs up in the higher echelons of the European Cup.
Spool forward to 2025 and Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United left their own unique pockmark on the European stage.
Drought over – Spurs join Palace and Newcastle in ending long wait for trophyThursday’s briefing: Differing fortunes for Ruben Amorim and Ange Postecoglou
The difference between two poor teams was wafer-thin.
No matter what angle you viewed it from, this season’s Europa League final was a horrible football match.
With a scruffy but precious one-goal lead to protect from the 42nd minute onwards, Tottenham were only slightly better than United.
At least defensively speaking.
With all the lofty, ideological talk of Amorim’s sworn 3-4-3 template, the last 15 minutes had come to this: aiming high, hopeful balls onto Harry Maguire’s head in the hope of forcing Wednesday’s woeful spectacle to extra-time.
Given what he’s had to endure at his weekly press conferences, you could only be happy for Postecoglou.
For his own sanity, though, he probably engaged too openly with the media and got himself into more spats than he needed.
More than anything, it has been Postecoglou’s journey through all levels of football, his blue-collar identity worn like a badge of honour, always backing himself in adversity and sneering back at the bluebloods of the game, as if to say, ‘I’m as good as you’.
He’s now a winner on the European stage and must feel empowered by the outcome in the wonderful San Mamés stadium on Wednesday evening regardless of whether Spurs retain him or not.
It’s a weird scenario that Postecoglou and Amorim are like two dead men walking straight after a European final.
Nobody would be surprised if both didn’t make it to the new Premier League season in August.
Even allowing for the structural ills at Old Trafford – the ownership, disastrous recruitment, the absolute state of the famous stadium – it still doesn’t disguise how poor Amorim has performed in the role.
There was no new-manager bounce when the affable Portuguese took the managerial reins from Erik ten Hag last November.
Under Amorim’s watch, United have accrued 24 league points from 25 matches, they sit in 16th place in the Premiership and are hurtling towards their worst points tally in nearly a century.
Amorim is a likeable individual. He’s open and honest in his dealings with the media.
On so many levels, football managers are salesmen. They are selling an image of themselves, a copyrighted idea that they believe will transform the club they are in charge of.
Amorim’s problem is that he says he has only one idea – 3-4-3 – and that there is no plan B.
Since last November he’s known that he didn’t have the right profile of player to successfully implement his lauded system – and yet he never deviated from it.
And what happened? Manchester United continued to lose game after game and dropped like a stone.
In football parlance, this was an exercise in self-harm.
Amorim placed square pegs and round holes, displayed no flexibility, and is paying for the consequences.
Amorim must have felt that any deviation from his trusted 3-4-3 would have been deemed as weakness.
But sticking with it made him look worse than weak.
There is this notion in football that if you’re not ideologically wedded to a way of playing you have no vision.
From the get-go, Amorim surveyed his playing resources and never played to their strengths – or rather, never tried to limit their weaknesses.
What he did was highlight them in the full glare of everyone.
Would it have killed Amorim to play a flat back four in search of consolidation in some games?
Would it have really weakened his celebrated 3-4-3 copyright?
Should he have not displayed more pragmatism? Is that not what good managers do when they don’t have the players to play their preferred system?
Could his 3-4-3 philosophy not have waited until he had a couple of transfer windows and a pre-season under his belt?
Granted, ten Hag left a trail of destruction behind him – but don’t make it worse.
But even if Amorim is given time and money to spend to bring his own players in, you must question how effective his 3-4-3 formation will eventually be.
If you don’t have control of midfield in that system, the entire operation is dysfunctional and destined to fail.
United need more quality in beside Bruno Fernandes to stand a chance – and even then a three-man defence can be ripped apart down the sides.
Maybe it is all down to finding the right personnel but on Wednesday night in Bilbao and on so many other occasions this season, the two wide players in the midfield four are often in a stationary position and don’t run into space.
So, United nearly always play in front of the opposition with little or no overlapping runs.
It’s so easy to defend against it.
And, lo and behold, United went backwards and sidewards in the second half against Spurs before slinging high balls into Maguire who was United’s best hope of an equaliser.
Alejandro Garnacho has shown time and again that he’s too erratic to be part of any United revival - but he is infinitely a better attacking option than Mason Mount – and yet the latter stayed on the field for 71 minutes offering nothing offensively.
You wondered about Amorim’s thought processes and his painful slowness to act in a sudden death, winner-takes-all European final scenario that had Champions League football dangling in front of them.
Amorim and United got what they deserved on Wednesday night - not that a scruffy win over Spurs would have brightened a desperately bleak landscape at the club.