Ruben Amorim has already revealed which former Manchester United manager is his role model

Ruben Amorim has gone from watching Manchester United matches while studying under Jose Mourinho to agreeing in principle to become their new permanent head coach in the space of seven years.

Before beginning his second career in football within months of retiring, Amorim earned a postgraduate degree in High Performance Coaching from the Faculty of Human Kinetics at the University of Lisbon. As part of that course, the recently retired player interned under Mourinho while his compatriot was United manager.

That included spending time at the club's Carrington Training Complex after being selected as one of the best students. Mourinho never managed Amorim during a 13-year playing career, but the young coach still looked up to him from afar.

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"I like United," Amorim said in November 2017 during an interview with Tribuna Expresso, the sports section of the Portuguese weekly newspaper Expresso," because Mourinho is my role model. There are coaches who have a way of watching the game that I like, like Guardiola.

"But for me, the role model is Mourinho, because I watch the ball in a way that's more similar to Mister Mourinho. That is, he analyses the opponents very well and sets his team up, not just with a certain style of play but thinking a lot about how to adapt to win. And I'm a bit like that.

"Guardiola, of course, also adapts, but not as much: the ball is supposed to go through the goalkeeper, and it always goes through the goalkeeper. I would like it to be like that, because they have the best reputation in the world of football, they