Ruben Amorim was a snake oil salesman. He was a stirring orator who mixed self-deprecation and bouts of public melancholia with unflinching assessments about quite how low Manchester United had sunk, but the truth is that he was an evangelist for a remedy that simply did not work.
He staked his reputation on a 3-4-2-1 system that he said not even the Pope could persuade him to change and he carried the fans and the United hierarchy along with him, as he rode through the streets in the golden carriage of a rigid formation that dragged the club down to its worst ever Premier League finish last season.