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Turns out Ruben Amorim could survive a loss to lower-league opposition. Survive an important European final against a particularly poor Spurs sides in living memory. He could survive home defeats against domestic rivals, finishing 15th, the tactical inflexibility, laying waste to some of the club’s most promising homegrown talent, a poor winning percentage, labeling his team the worst the club has ever seen. But there was a single opponent with whom Ruben Amorim was not permitted to engage. You come at the sporting director, you had better succeed.

Unfortunately, like many a top-flight defender during Blackburn Rovers' championship campaign, the coach took on the executive and seems to have failed. Even the most casual observer will notice the irony here: a manager who often railed his squad for losing individual battles crumbling in the face of the intense pressure and formidable presence of one of England's top division's most intimidating football executives.

And frankly, this whole painful saga appears to portray the director in a whole new light. It may have been easy, given his nine months in a similar role with the Saints, to regard Jason Wilcox as merely a functionary within the club's structure: an individual who owed his position largely to his friendship with ex-colleague Omar Berrada as any demonstrable skill. How wrong we all were. By masterfully outmanoeuvring United’s feted manager, just as he bested the unfortunate a previous executive earlier, Jason Wilcox has proved himself as one of football's true generals: a strategic mind of which United’s competitors are now rightly wary.

A Strategic Conflict Over System and Ideology

For example, it was the director who having been part of the leadership that hired the 3-4-3 fundamentalist the coach originally, played a key role in attempting to convince Amorim to abandon his favored 3-4-3. Naturally, these entreaties met a certain resistance. But perhaps such directives carry more weight when delivered from the mouth with the impeccable football pedigree he possesses, holder of three England caps and a contributor to a title-winning side decades past.

Maybe eventually Jason Wilcox may be persuaded to outline his thought processes to the rest of us. Maybe one day questions may arise why Amorim is walking away with full compensation, without any penalty clause activated. The director speaks rarely publicly, for excellent reasons. The real thinkers in football – individuals such as 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 ultrasonic blips and four-dimensional whirring. Desiring an explanation is not quite equivalent to being ready to comprehend it.

The Ultimate Authority In the Throne

Naturally, in training our focus on the sporting director we are obscuring the real power behind the club's current leadership. The director is, after all, simply carrying out the directives of his ultimate line manager the billionaire owner, who in private has emphasized his preference for a back four. According to reports, the owner has also suggested playing Bryan Mbeumo in a wing-back role. Ratcliffe is keen for the club to embrace data science and metrics. Per reports, in an executive meeting soon after his minority ownership, he announced that United’s style to football “shall be determined by this group”.

After all, Ratcliffe is a specialist in these intricate footballing stuff, leveraging his background in industry and yachting. Above all he is immensely wealthy, and as we all know, the wealthy are the best of us: more perceptive, more wise, more tactically astute, fundamentally superior. Who else could one trust to manage an enlightened programme of cost-cutting, the construction of a modern arena that appears similar to someone’s leftover knitting, the signing of Benjamin Sesko?

The Modern Soccer Order: Executives Over Managers

This represents a shift that is becoming prevalent in top-tier football. For decades, clubs foolishly delegated major sporting choices to low-level employees such as coaches, scouts – players themselves. Maybe previously feasible for a young, innovative manager with a philosophy and energy to go into a club and see their vision through to completion. But how many businesses have such individuals established? What number of mass redundancies have they managed? Far preferable to place genuine authority where it belongs: the executive class, the open-necked shirt brigade, the guys with the jaw-dropping professional resumes. It is wiser to determine the tactics in the boardroom and hire someone who can tailor their offering accordingly. If managers were formerly chefs, they have become more akin to Deliveroo drivers: not really creating the product, but still ultimately answerable should it be delivered poorly or fails to meet standards.

Nowadays, a coach's role has become less about crafting the philosophy and more about marketing it: the front-facing representative of the operation, the public face for a club they can do little to influence. A coach at Chelsea leads a team of literal children into the Champions League and wins domestic cups, and essentially gets sacked for talking. A manager at Celtic finds his reputation ruined while those individuals who hired him continue to make errors indefinitely.

The Modern Corporate Football: Accountability for the Coaches

And perhaps in a small way this represents neoliberalism at work: the elevation of a gilded overclass who can never be wrong, whose choices remain untouchable, whose errors can always be sacked away without justification. Hire the 3-4-3 coach and then fire them for using excessively 3-4-3. Hire the project manager and later discard him for taking too long. And most importantly show gratitude; for the incremental increases in ticket costs, for the latest player acquisitions, for the fact that the grownups – however well qualified – are in charge.