🔗 Share this article

Turns out Ruben Amorim endured a loss to lower-league opposition. Survive a decisive continental showpiece versus one of the worst Tottenham teams for many years. He withstood losing at home against West Ham and Wolves, finishing 15th, the tactical inflexibility, laying waste to the team's most promising academy products, the 32% win rate, calling his team the poorest in Manchester United history. Yet, there existed a single opponent with whom Ruben Amorim would not be allowed to engage. If you challenge Jason Wilcox, you had better succeed.

Regrettably, like many a top-flight defender during Blackburn Rovers' championship campaign, Amorim took on Jason Wilcox and seems to have failed. The most distracted of readers can see the irony here: a manager who often railed at his players for failing in individual battles crumbling in the face of the white heat and formidable presence of one of the Premier League’s most feared football executives.

In truth, this entire bruising episode seems to paint the director in a whole new light. It may have been tempting, given his brief stint in a similar role at Southampton, to regard him as merely a functionary within the club's structure: a man who owed his position largely to his friendship with ex-colleague Omar Berrada as any verifiable talent. How wrong we all were. By masterfully outsmarting United’s feted head coach, just as he bested the unfortunate Dan Ashworth before him, Jason Wilcox has proved himself to be among football's strategic masterminds: a strategic mind that the club's mid-table rivals will now be rightly wary.

The Tactical Clash Over Formation & Ideology

To illustrate, this was the director who having been part of the leadership that appointed the rigid 3-4-3 advocate the coach originally, was instrumental in trying to persuade Amorim to ditch his beloved 3-4-3. Naturally, these pleas faced pushback. But perhaps such directives hold greater authority when issued from the mouth with the impeccable soccer background of Jason Wilcox, holder of three England caps and a contributor to a championship team decades past.

Maybe eventually Jason Wilcox might agree to outline his reasoning to the rest of us. Maybe one day questions may arise regarding why the coach is departing with full compensation, with no penalty clause activated. The director seldom speaks in public, for excellent reasons. The true intellectuals in football – men like Jason Wilcox – function at a level beyond our own mundane comprehension. If he ever did speak, probably all we would hear is a series of high-frequency signals and four-dimensional whirring. Wanting is not the same as being ready to comprehend it.

An Ultimate Power Behind Command

Naturally, in training our focus on Jason Wilcox we are obscuring the real power behind the club's current leadership. Jason Wilcox is, in reality, simply carrying out the directives of his line manager Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who in private has made very clear his desire for a back four. According to reports, the owner has also suggested deploying the forward in a wing-back role. Ratcliffe is keen for the club to adopt analytics and analytics. According to ESPN, during a leadership summit soon after his minority ownership, he declared that the team's approach of play “shall be decided by this group”.

Ultimately, Ratcliffe is an expert in these intricate footballing stuff, drawing from his background in industry and yachting. Above all he remains incredibly rich, and as we all know, the rich are superior: more insightful, sagacious, more tactically astute, fundamentally better. Whom else would you trust to manage a strategic plan of austerity, the construction of a modern arena that appears a lot like someone’s leftover knitting, the acquisition of Benjamin Sesko?

The New Soccer Hierarchy: Directors Above Coaches

This is a trend we are increasingly seeing at the elite levels of the game. Historically, clubs foolishly entrusted major sporting choices to low-level employees such as coaches, scouts – players themselves. Perhaps it was once feasible for an up-and-coming, visionary coach with a philosophy and energy to join an organization and implement their plan through to completion. Yet how many companies have these guys set up? What number of large-scale layoffs have they managed? Better by far to invest the real power where it belongs: the executive class, the casually dressed executives, the individuals with impressive LinkedIn profiles. It is wiser to determine the tactics by the directors and appoint someone who will adapt their methods to suit. If managers were formerly chefs, they are now more like delivery personnel: not really creating the product, but still ultimately answerable if it arrives poorly or leaks out to meet standards.

Nowadays, their job has become less about defining the vision and more about marketing it: the receptionist on the front desk, the visible figurehead for a club they can do little to influence. A coach at Chelsea leads a team of literal children into Europe and secures domestic cups, and essentially is dismissed for speaking out. Wilfried Nancy finds his standing damaged whereas the people who hired him continue to make errors indefinitely.

The Neoliberal Football: Accountability for the Few

And possibly in a small way this is simply corporate governance at work: the rise of a gilded elite who can never be wrong, whose decisions are always untouchable, whose mistakes can always be resolved by sacking without justification. Appoint the 3-4-3 coach and then fire them for using too much that system. Bring in the process guy and then discard them for requiring excessive time. And above all show gratitude; for the incremental increases in ticket costs, for your new player acquisitions, for the fact that the grownups – however well qualified – remain in control.