It’s official. Casemiro will leave Manchester United when his contract expires this summer, and the club have confirmed they won’t be triggering the one-year extension option.

The news, announced on Thursday, brings to an end what can only be described as a turbulent but trophy-laden spell for the Brazilian midfielder. Four years, five different managers, two cups, and an awful lot of money—that’s the Casemiro story at Old Trafford in a nutshell.

The end of Ruben Amorim’s tenure at Manchester United raised more questions than it answered. Fourteen months after his appointment, the club found itself in a familiar position: another managerial change, and fresh uncertainty over the direction of the club. What went wrong, and how did it come to this?

To understand the Amorim era, it helps to start with the environment that produced it. That means revisiting United’s dealings since their last stretch of relative stability under Ole Gunnar Solskjær in 2021.