Take a stand, Ruben! Meaningless mid-season matches in Saudi Arabia could cost Amorim's Man Utd Champions League qualification

While Amorim is right that United will have a big hole in their budget by not qualifying for Europe and will have to forgo additional matchday revenue from not hosting mid-week games at Old Trafford, they are unlikely to come close to plugging the gaps with extra friendlies.

United's end-of-season tour of Asia was a degrading experience for the club, taking place just a few days after their defeat to Tottenham in the Europa League final. The six-day jaunt saw them play friendlies in Hong Kong and Malaysia while some players did a promotional visit to India. The team lost to ASEAN All-Stars and needed a comeback to beat a Hong Kong XI, while Amad Diallo and Alejandro Garnacho had unsavoury exchanges with locals. 

All the while, reports about Bruno Fernandes being offered a lucrative move to Al-Hilal were rumbling about. While pre-season tours are the norm for all major clubs and a huge part of preparing for a campaign, post-season trips feel more like a travelling circus. And heading on a mid-season tour, sandwiching foreign trips in between vital Premier League games, would be even more undignified.

The whole ordeal in Asia netted United a reported £10 million. Not bad for a week's work, you might say. But it paled in comparison to the £100m they missed out on by failing to qualify for the Champions League. To make up the gap entirely, they would have to make 10 such trips, playing 20 games. That would be completely unworkable, and in all likelihood the club would make just one trip. 

And even if they could match what they made in May in Asia and pocket another £10m, it is still a negligible amount of money. A drop in the ocean in the context of the £666m in total revenue they earned last season, even without Champions League football. 

They could have saved that amount of money, if not more, by being just a little more prudent in the transfer market. For example, keeping Rasmus Hojlund rather than negotiating his exit for half the price they paid for him, while bringing in Benjamin Sesko for £74m despite him also being at a similar stage in his career and with no Premier League experience.

Earning £10m here and there will not significantly help United tackle their rising debt. As the club have acknowledged privately and publicly, the only way for United to become financially sustainable and stop the six-year trend of losing money is for them to get back to finishing near the top of the Premier League and qualify consistently for the Champions League.

And going on mid-season trips to other continents and time zones could directly impact that goal. Although United were nowhere near it, there was an extremely close race to qualify for the Champions League, with just one point in the end separating Nottingham Forest in seventh and Newcastle United, who finished fifth and nabbed the last ticket to Europe's top competition. Aston Villa missed out on the lucrative revenues of Champions League football on goal difference.

Every point counts in the race to finish in the top five or top four (depending on whether English football teams perform well in Europe and earn one of the two extra places on offer). So, imagine that United missed out on the Champions League by a couple of points and had earlier in the season drawn or lost their next game after an eight-hour flight back from Riyadh or a 15-hour journey back from Tokyo.

Even the best United side in recent memory paid a price in results for a mid-season friendly in Saudi Arabia. The great United side containing Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Carlos Tevez et al played against Al-Hilal in late January 2008. They won their next game against Portsmouth but not long after they only scraped a 1-1 draw at Tottenham and a week later lost 2-1 at home to a Manchester City side two years before their lucrative takeover.

It should also not be forgotten that European qualification is not the only route to earning more money on the pitch. The Premier League offers extra motivation for finishing higher up the table in the form of merit payments, which consist of combined earnings from both domestic and international television broadcast deals and are distributed on a sliding scale from 1st to 20th. 

The Red Devils' combined merit payment for finishing 15th last season was £15.9m. West Ham, who finished 14th, earned £18.6m, a difference of £2.7m for one point. Brentford pocketed £29.1m by virtue of finishing 10th. Had United finished eighth - as they did in Erik ten Hag's second season - they would have taken home £34.5m. That's a difference of £18.5m, worth only marginally less than two post-season trips to Asia.

While United could also spin the exhibition games as time to do warm weather training, it is not as if mid-season trips to sunnier climes always go well. Liverpool's trip to Portugal's Algarve to 'recharge batteries' in February 2007 led to Craig Bellamy swinging a golf club at John Arne Riise which, in the words of the Norwegian former defender, "could have ended my career". 

Arsenal went to Dubai in February for a warm weather campaign but disaster struck when Kai Havertz injured his hamstring, ruling him out for the rest of the season and leaving the Gunners with no centre-forward, forcing them to play Mikel Merino up top. Havertz has not been the same player since and he is currently recovering from knee surgery after playing just 30 minutes of this campaign.

Warm weather training might sound like fun but it hardly helps prepare you for the return to the bitter English winter, which is where points will be won and lost.

United are still very far from being the team that Amorim wants them to be even after their recent win over Sunderland and the only way for them to improve under the coach is to keep on training and make the most of the free weeks they have. The last thing they should be doing is playing more games and training in unfamiliar surroundings.

When news emerged that United were considering playing mid-season friendlies to raise money, it was hard not to think of the words of former Red Devils' midfielder Nemanja Matic earlier this year. "The difference I felt after Chelsea was that, at Chelsea, everything was about the result and winning trophies," Matic told The Athletic. 

"That was the spirit in the whole club, even from the man who cuts the grass. Roman Abramovich would only ask us about results. At United, it was more commercial-minded. I started to think that after a couple of months in the club. I understand that our salary needs to be paid, but I felt that the results were not the focus like it was at Chelsea. I maybe did two commercial jobs at Chelsea, at United it was far more."

Amorim, like most coaches, does not want anything to get in the way of preparing his team. It is why he rightly shunned the opportunity to record a behind-the-scenes documentary this season, even though it would have generated a decent amount of money (an estimated £10m at least) and raised the club's profile even further.

And that's why he should try and convince the people that run United to also do a U-turn on the notion of these money-chasing games. While United's commercial appeal has sheltered them from the financial pitfalls that have fallen other clubs when their on-pitch fortunes have nosedived, they need to get back to being a team that is renowned for winning, not meeting their commercial objectives.