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Transpired the manager was able to withstand defeat by lower-league opposition. He weathered a decisive continental showpiece against a particularly poor Tottenham teams in living memory. He could survive losing at home against domestic rivals, finishing 15th, an unwavering system, laying waste to the team's most promising homegrown talent, the 32% win rate, calling his team the poorest in Manchester United history. Yet, there existed one adversary with whom Ruben Amorim would not be allowed to tango. You come at the sporting director, you had better succeed.

Unfortunately, like many a Premiership right-back during Blackburn Rovers' championship campaign, Amorim took on Jason Wilcox and seems to have missed. Even the most casual observer will notice the paradoxical situation: a coach who frequently berated his squad for failing in individual battles succumbing in the face of the white heat and formidable presence of a the Premier League’s most intimidating sporting directors.

In truth, this entire bruising episode seems to paint the director in a different perspective. Perhaps it might have been easy, given his nine months of experience at Southampton, to view him as merely a drudge within the club's structure: an individual who owed his position as much to his friendship with ex-colleague Omar Berrada rather than any demonstrable skill. How wrong we all were. In brilliantly outsmarting United’s feted manager, as he outmanoeuvred the hapless a previous executive earlier, he has demonstrated to be among the sport’s strategic masterminds: a strategic mind that the club's competitors will now be rightly wary.

A Strategic Clash Over Formation & Philosophy

To illustrate, this was Jason Wilcox , after having been part of the leadership that hired the rigid 3-4-3 advocate Amorim in the first place, played a key role in attempting to convince him to abandon his favored 3-4-3. Unsurprisingly, these pleas were resisted. However, these judgements carry more weight when issued from the mouth of a man the unimpeachable soccer background he possesses, holder of international appearances and a contributor to a title-winning side decades past.

Perhaps in time he might agree to outline his reasoning to the rest of us. Perhaps at some point he might be asked regarding why the coach is departing with a full payout, without any penalty clause in place. The director seldom speaks publicly, for excellent reasons. The real thinkers of this sport – individuals such as Jason Wilcox – function on a plane beyond our own prosaic understanding. If he ever did speak, most likely all we would hear is a series of ultrasonic blips and four-dimensional whirring. Desiring an explanation is not equivalent to being ready to comprehend it.

An Supreme Authority In Command

Naturally, by focusing our attention on the sporting director we are obscuring the real power behind the modern United throne. The director is, in reality, simply carrying out the directives of his ultimate line manager the billionaire owner, who privately has made very clear his desire for a four-man defense. According to reports, Ratcliffe has also proposed deploying the forward as a right wing-back. The owner is eager for the club to embrace data science and analytics. Per reports, during a leadership summit soon after his minority ownership, he declared that United’s style to football “shall be determined by this group”.

Ultimately, Ratcliffe is a specialist in this technical footballing stuff, leveraging his previous experience in industry and yachting. Above all he is immensely wealthy, and as we all know, the rich are superior: more perceptive, sagacious, strategically brilliant, fundamentally superior. Who else would you trust to oversee a strategic plan of cost-cutting, the construction of a new stadium that looks a lot like an abstract design, the signing of Benjamin Sesko?

A Modern Football Hierarchy: Executives Above Managers

This is a trend we are increasingly seeing at the elite levels of the game. For decades, teams mistakenly delegated major sporting choices to subordinate staff like managers, scouts – even footballers. Maybe previously possible for an up-and-coming, innovative manager with a philosophy and energy to join a club and see their vision supported to fruition. Yet how many businesses have these guys established? How many mass redundancies have they overseen? Far preferable to place the real power where it belongs: the executive class, the casually dressed executives, the guys with the jaw-dropping LinkedIn profiles. It is wiser to decide the tactics in the boardroom and appoint a coach who will adapt their offering accordingly. If coaches were formerly chefs, they are now more like delivery personnel: not creating the product, yet ultimately answerable if it arrives poorly or fails to meet standards.

Nowadays, a coach's role has become not about defining the vision and more about marketing it: the front-facing representative on the front desk, the public face for a club they have minimal power to change. A coach at Chelsea leads a team of literal children into the Champions League and wins two medium-sized trophies, and effectively gets sacked for speaking out. A manager at Celtic finds his standing damaged while those individuals who hired him live to blunder another day.

A Neoliberal Game: Accountability Only for the Few

And perhaps in a small way this represents corporate governance at work: the elevation of a privileged elite who can never be wrong, whose decisions are always untouchable, whose mistakes can always be sacked away without justification. Appoint the system coach and then dismiss them for playing excessively that system. Bring in the project manager and then bin him for requiring too long. And above all show gratitude; for your modest increases in ticket costs, for your new player acquisitions, for the reality that the adults – however well qualified – are in charge.