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Transpired the manager could survive defeat by Grimsby. Survive a decisive continental showpiece versus a particularly poor Tottenham teams for many years. He could survive losing at home to domestic rivals, finishing 15th, his rigid approach, undermining some of the club’s best academy products, a poor winning percentage, labeling the squad 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, and you best not miss.

Unfortunately, like many a Premiership right-back during Blackburn Rovers' championship 1994-95 season, the coach came at Jason Wilcox and seems to have missed. The most distracted of readers will notice the irony here: a coach who often railed at his players for failing in one-on-one duels crumbling when confronted by the white heat and formidable presence of one of England's top division's most intimidating football executives.

And frankly, this whole painful saga seems to paint the director in a different perspective. Perhaps it might have been tempting, given his nine months of experience with the Saints, to regard him as merely a drudge within the club's structure: a man whose appointment was due largely to his friendship with his former boss a fellow executive rather than any verifiable talent. How wrong we all were. In brilliantly outmanoeuvring the club's celebrated head coach, just as he bested the hapless a previous executive before him, he has demonstrated to be among football's strategic masterminds: a strategic mind of which the club's competitors will now be justifiably concerned.

The Strategic Conflict Regarding System & Philosophy

To illustrate, this was the director who being involved in the leadership that hired the rigid 3-4-3 advocate Amorim originally, played a key role in attempting to convince him to ditch his beloved 3-4-3. Unsurprisingly, these pleas met a certain resistance. But perhaps such directives carry more weight when issued by a man with the impeccable football pedigree of Jason Wilcox, a veteran of three England caps and a role in a championship team from 31 years ago.

Perhaps in time he may be persuaded to explain his thought processes to the rest of us. Perhaps at some point questions may arise why Amorim is walking away with full compensation, with no penalty clause in place. The director speaks rarely publicly, and with very good reason. The real thinkers in football – individuals such as Jason Wilcox – simply operate at a level exceeding our prosaic understanding. Were he to speak, probably all we would hear would be ultrasonic blips and four-dimensional whirring. Wanting is not quite equivalent to being prepared to comprehend it.

An Ultimate Power In the Throne

But of course, by focusing our attention on Jason Wilcox we are obscuring the true genius behind the club's current leadership. The director is, in reality, merely executing the commands of his line manager the billionaire owner, who in private has emphasized his preference for a back four. According to reports, the owner has also suggested deploying the forward in a wing-back role. The owner is eager for the club to adopt data science and analytics. Per reports, during a leadership summit early in his investment, he announced that United’s style of play “will be determined in this room”.

Ultimately, Ratcliffe is a specialist in this technical footballing stuff, leveraging his background in industry and yachting. Above all he remains incredibly rich, and as we all know, the rich are the best of us: more insightful, sagacious, more tactically astute, simply better. Who else could one trust to manage a strategic plan of cost-cutting, the construction of a new stadium that looks a lot like someone’s leftover knitting, the acquisition of Benjamin Sesko?

A Modern Soccer Hierarchy: Executives Over Coaches

This is a trend we are increasingly seeing in top-tier football. Historically, teams mistakenly entrusted big footballing decisions to low-level employees such as coaches, scouts – players themselves. Maybe previously feasible for an up-and-coming, innovative manager with ideas and drive to go into an organization and see their vision supported to fruition. But how many companies have these guys set up? How many mass redundancies have they managed? Better by far to place genuine authority where it rightly belongs: the executive class, the open-necked shirt brigade, the guys with impressive LinkedIn profiles. It is wiser to decide the strategy by the directors and appoint a coach who can tailor their methods to suit. If coaches were formerly chefs, they are now more like delivery personnel: not responsible for the product, but still ultimately answerable should it be delivered cold or fails of the box.

Nowadays, their job has become not about defining the vision and more about selling it: the front-facing representative of the operation, the visible figurehead for a club they can do little to change. A coach at Chelsea leads a team of very young players into Europe and secures two medium-sized trophies, and essentially is dismissed for speaking out. A manager at Celtic finds his reputation ruined whereas those individuals who appointed him live to blunder indefinitely.

The Neoliberal Game: Accountability Only for the Coaches

And possibly in a small way this is simply corporate governance at work: the rise of a gilded overclass who can never be wrong, whose decisions remain sacrosanct, whose errors can invariably be sacked away without justification. Appoint the system coach and then dismiss them for playing too much that system. Hire the process guy and later bin him for taking too long. And above all be grateful; for your modest increases in ticket costs, for the latest player acquisitions, for the reality that the adults – regardless of their expertise – remain in control.