The Coach's Fatal Error? Taking On The Executives and the Infallible Leadership Class

Turns out the manager was able to withstand defeat by lower-league opposition. He weathered an important continental showpiece versus a particularly poor Spurs sides in living memory. He withstood home defeats to domestic rivals, a lowly league position, his rigid approach, laying waste to the team's best homegrown talent, the 32% win rate, calling his team the worst the club has ever seen. But there was a single opponent with whom the Portuguese coach would not be allowed to engage. If you challenge the sporting director, you had better succeed.

In truth, this entire bruising episode seems to paint the director in a whole new light. It may have been easy, given his nine months of experience at Southampton, to regard Jason Wilcox as merely a functionary in the United exoskeleton: a man whose appointment was due as much to his close relationship with ex-colleague a fellow executive rather than any verifiable talent. How mistaken we all were. By masterfully outsmarting United’s feted manager, just as he bested the hapless Dan Ashworth earlier, Jason Wilcox has demonstrated as one of football's true generals: a strategic mind of which the club's mid-table rivals are now rightly wary.

The Strategic Clash Regarding System and Philosophy

To illustrate, it was Jason Wilcox who being involved in the leadership that hired the rigid 3-4-3 advocate Amorim in the first place, was instrumental in attempting to convince Amorim to ditch his beloved formation. Naturally, these entreaties were resisted. However, these judgements hold greater authority when issued from the mouth of a man the impeccable soccer background of Jason Wilcox, holder of three England caps and a role in a title-winning side decades past.

Maybe eventually 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 activated. The director speaks rarely publicly, and with very good reason. The real thinkers in football – men like Jason Wilcox – simply operate at a level exceeding our prosaic understanding. Were he to speak, most likely all we would hear is a series of high-frequency signals and complex calculations. Desiring an explanation is not equivalent to being ready to comprehend it.

An Ultimate Authority Behind Command

But of course, in training our focus on Jason Wilcox we are obscuring the real power behind the modern United throne. Jason Wilcox is, after all, merely executing the commands of his line manager Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who in private has made very clear his desire for a back four. According to reports, Ratcliffe has also suggested deploying the forward as a right wing-back. Ratcliffe is keen for United to adopt analytics and metrics. According to ESPN, in an executive meeting early in his investment, he declared that United’s style to football “shall be determined in this room”.

After all, Sir Jim is a specialist in this technical football matters, drawing from his previous experience in petrochemicals and yachting. Most importantly he is incredibly rich, and as we all know, the rich are the best of us: more perceptive, sagacious, strategically brilliant, fundamentally better. Whom else would you trust to oversee a strategic plan of austerity, the construction of a modern arena that appears a lot like an abstract design, the signing of Benjamin Sesko?

A New Soccer Order: Executives Above Managers

This is a trend that is becoming prevalent at the elite levels football. Historically, teams mistakenly entrusted major sporting choices to subordinate staff like managers, talent spotters – even footballers. Maybe previously possible for a young, visionary coach with ideas and drive to join a club and implement their plan through to completion. Yet how many businesses have such individuals established? How many mass redundancies have they overseen? Better by far to place the real power where it belongs: the executive class, the open-necked shirt brigade, the individuals with the jaw-dropping LinkedIn profiles. Better by far to determine the tactics in the boardroom and appoint a coach who can tailor their offering to suit. If managers were once chefs, they are now more like delivery personnel: not responsible for the food, yet ultimately answerable should it be delivered poorly or fails of the box.

Nowadays, their job is increasingly less about defining the vision and more about selling it: the front-facing representative on the front desk, the visible figurehead of an organisation they have minimal power to change. A coach at Chelsea leads a team of literal children into Europe and wins two medium-sized trophies, and essentially gets sacked for talking. A manager at Celtic finds his reputation ruined while the people who hired him continue to make errors indefinitely.

A Modern Corporate Football: Responsibility for the Coaches

And possibly 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 sacrosanct, whose errors can always be sacked away without explanation. Hire the 3-4-3 coach and then fire him for using excessively that system. Hire the project manager and then discard them for requiring excessive time. And above all be grateful; for the incremental season ticket price rises, for your new player acquisitions, for the reality that the adults – regardless of their expertise – remain in control.