Omar Berrada confirms Man Utd's 'roadmap' to success with Ruben Amorim verdict
After their worst-ever Premier League finish, the notion of Manchester United being crowned champions any time soon is as fanciful as it is laughable. United finished last season in 15th place, but chief executive Omar Berrada has doubled down on his belief they will lift the Premier League trophy by 2028 – if not before.
Berrada launched Project 150, the bold aim of which is for United to win a 21st league title by 2028, the year the club celebrates its 150th anniversary.
But after the shambles of last season, when United suffered 18 league defeats, failed to get beyond the quarter-finals of both domestic cups and lost the Europa League final to ensure no European football next term, the situation is as bleak as it has ever been in the post-Sir Alex Ferguson era.
Despite that, Berrada is confident with boss Ruben Amorim in charge, the right player recruitment and stability off the field in terms of the club's finances, United can reach the top again within three years.
Asked if winning the title in that timeframe was realistic, Berrada told
"Of course. We've just finished 15th and it seems like an impossible task. But why not aim for it? Why not do everything in our power?
"I firmly believe that we can do it. We have two or three summer windows to build a team to start competing to win the Premier League and if we can achieve it before then, we'll all be happy — and so nobody's saying that we don't want to win it until then.'
Berrada added: "Project 150 is a very simple idea. We're going to celebrate our 150th anniversary in June 2028, an important milestone in the history of the club. It's a way of setting a time-bound period where we're going to focus our efforts to achieve certain goals.
"All we're saying is we're setting ourselves a target with a specific timeframe to go and aim for because if you just said 'we want to win the Premier League' - great, but by when? So this way, again it's from the ownership to management, to everybody in the club, we have a target, we have a mission and that's what we want to achieve."
Berrada admitted appointing Amorim a third of the way through last season was always likely to bring difficulties, given his insistence on playing a 3-4-3 formation unfamiliar to the players he inherited from Erik ten Hag.
But Berrada said United were willing to accept short-term pain for long-term gain, in the knowledge 40-year-old Portuguese coach Amorim is the right man to lead the club back to its former glory days.
"We knew that by bringing in Ruben mid-season that it was going to be even more difficult for the team to perform," Berrada added.
"We saw it as an investment for the following seasons, because we were going to give time to Ruben to get to know the squad, the club, the Premier League. So by the time that we got to now, we'd have had all the discussions about what the squad needs and the two-to-three-year plan to get to a squad that's capable of winning the Premier League.
"We have a very clear roadmap of how we're going to get there. Had Ruben started on July 1, 2025, we wouldn't have been able to have all that knowledge, right? And that's what I feel these seven or eight months that he's had. He's suffered in the Premier League, and the team has suffered. That's why I feel that it's really going to help us in the future.
'I firmly believe in Ruben as a coach and what he's trying to do. We've taken all the short-term pain this season but, as of this summer, the worst bit is going to be behind us.
"I'm actually very optimistic and quite positive about what's ahead. Of course we need to get a lot of decisions right and we will make mistakes, there's no doubt. We'll try to minimise those. But what we want is to build something that's sustainable for the long, long term.
"We've put ourselves in the best position possible by doing everything that we've had this year around cost-cutting. I'm confident we will come out of the window with a much stronger team than what we've gone into."
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