MANCHESTER, England — Manchester United has parted ways with its manager, José Mourinho, two days after a defeat to its archrival Liverpool compounded the club’s worst-ever start to a Premier League season. The club confirmed Mourinho’s departure, halfway through his third year at Old Trafford, in a brief statement on its website on Tuesday morning. United thanked the Portuguese manager for his work and wished him “success in the future” in announcing that he had left the club, three years to the week since Chelsea fired him for a second time. Mourinho has worked at some of the world’s top soccer clubs — in addition to Chelsea, he has coached at Real Madrid, Inter Milan and Porto — and had long coveted the chance to work at United. He described his appointment in the summer of 2016 as a “special honor.”United has struggled to find a replacement for Alec Ferguson since his departure in 2013, and Ed Woodward, the club’s executive vice chairman, boasted at the time of Mourinho’s hiring that he was “quite simply, the best manager in the world today.”

Source: New York Times December 18, 2018 11:23 UTC