After the final whistle, Rúben Amorim walked onto the pitch holding his gilet, only to realize that the next 10 minutes would be better spent without it. He then retreated to remove it, marking the only hiccup in an otherwise extraordinary final evening at the lively José Alvalade. His team conceded within the first four minutes, yet managed to hold onto a one-goal deficit against Manchester City for the opening 35 minutes. In the remarkable second half, they orchestrated a stunning victory over the English champions. Following this triumph, Amorim's first task in Manchester will be managing expectations, a job that began immediately after the match. When asked if he had a message for United's fans, he was clear: “This means nothing. Don’t take anything from this. We were lucky. It was a one-off. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Amorim is evidently not one to bask in the limelight, and if there was one thing missing from this emotional final night in front of his home fans, it was his full embrace of the occasion. Once he returned to the pitch without his gilet, every player on his side, and a few from the opposing team, received a warm embrace. Perhaps this was a way to avoid standing alone. After the game, as staff and players headed to the loudest section of the ground to applaud the fans, Amorim remained cautiously in the crowd, needing to be nudged twice to step forward and soak up some solo appreciation. His night concluded with him being tossed into the air three times—an unexpected move his team hadn't prepared for—before he ducked back down the tunnel and out of sight.
Earlier, Amorim had been the last to emerge from the tunnel before the game, sharing a hug with Pep Guardiola and strolling to the Sporting bench. The notion that this would be the extent of his attention was short-lived. A massive portrait, adorned with the word “obrigado”—thank you—was lowered in front of the opposite stand, and club president Frederico Varandas invited him onto the pitch to receive a framed poster. A large picture of Rúben Amorim with the words Ruben and Amorim seemed an odd gift for the actual Rúben Amorim, but some people are just hard to buy for. What he likely wanted most was about to unfold, transforming a night that could have been tinged with sadness into one of pure sporting joy and deafening noise.
This is a club that doesn't do things by halves: they don’t just have a pre-match anthem but an entire musical, a half-hour greatest hits set. Familiar songs accompanied a wearily familiar dance. In the summer, Sporting lost 20-year-olds Abdul Fatawu to Leicester and Mateus Fernandes to Southampton. Over the last couple of years, Pedro Porro moved to Spurs, Youssef Chermiti to Everton, Matheus Nunes to City via Wolves, and João Palhinha to Fulham. Sporting’s director of football, Hugo Viana, will take up a similar position at City at the end of the season. And now Amorim. If the Premier League excels at anything, it's identifying prime talent, circling and scouting, and occasionally swooping in to claim the best players.
Here were Sporting’s supporters, grappling with the man they credit with ending a 19-year league trophy drought being torn from their embrace, yet expected to cheer as it happened. None of this is new for this club, and if the first cut is indeed the deepest, they should be dealing with superficial scratches by now, but it still stings. While the club’s allocation of tickets for Amorim’s final game at Braga on Sunday sold out in a minute, there were empty seats behind both goals here. At least Viktor Gyökeres, widely expected to be the next to leave, seemed to do his best to deter potential suitors. Remarkably, despite spending much of the game in offside positions, showing little interest when his own side had the ball and none when City did, and missing two great goalscoring opportunities, he still ended the game with a hat-trick and a tally of 23 goals in 17 games this season. The suitors will be circling regardless. He’ll just have to try harder—or rather, less hard—in the future. On this night, everything Sporting did went perfectly.
“It was a beautiful evening,” Amorim said after the game. “I’m going to keep these memories forever.” That framed poster, though, perhaps not.
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