🔗 Share this article

Turns out Ruben Amorim was able to withstand a loss to Grimsby. Survive a decisive continental showpiece versus a particularly poor Tottenham teams for many years. He withstood home defeats against domestic rivals, finishing 15th, his rigid approach, undermining some of the club’s most promising homegrown talent, the 32% win rate, labeling 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 tango. If you challenge the sporting director, and you best not miss.

Unfortunately, like many a Premiership right-back during Blackburn Rovers' championship campaign, Amorim came at Jason Wilcox and appears to have missed. The most casual observer can see the paradoxical situation: a coach who frequently berated his squad for failing in one-on-one duels succumbing in the face of the white heat and animal charisma of a England's top division's most intimidating sporting directors.

In truth, this entire bruising episode appears to portray Jason Wilcox in a whole new light. Perhaps it might have been tempting, given his brief stint of experience at Southampton, to regard him as little more than a functionary in the United exoskeleton: an individual whose appointment was due largely to his friendship with ex-colleague a fellow executive as any verifiable talent. How wrong everyone was. In brilliantly outsmarting United’s feted head coach, just as he bested the unfortunate Dan Ashworth before him, he has proved himself to be among football's strategic masterminds: a tactical intellect of which United’s competitors will now be rightly wary.

The Strategic Conflict Over Formation & Philosophy

To illustrate, it was the director , after having been part of the leadership that hired the 3-4-3 fundamentalist Amorim in the first place, was instrumental in trying to persuade Amorim to ditch his favored formation. Unsurprisingly, these entreaties faced pushback. However, these judgements hold greater authority when issued from the mouth of a man the unimpeachable football pedigree of Jason Wilcox, a veteran of international appearances and a role in a championship team decades past.

Maybe eventually he might agree to explain his reasoning publicly. Maybe one day he might be asked why Amorim is departing with a full payout, without any compensation reduction clause activated. The director seldom speaks in public, and with very good reason. The true intellectuals in football – individuals such as him – function at a level exceeding our prosaic understanding. Were he to speak, most likely all we would hear would be ultrasonic blips and complex calculations. Desiring an explanation is not the same as being ready to receive.

An Ultimate Authority Behind Command

But of course, in training our focus on the sporting director we are obscuring the real power behind the club's current leadership. Jason Wilcox is, after all, simply carrying out the commands of his ultimate superior Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who in private has made very clear his desire for a back four. According to reports, the owner has also proposed playing Bryan Mbeumo in a wing-back role. The owner is eager for the club to embrace data science and metrics. Per reports, in an executive meeting soon after his minority ownership, he announced that the team's approach of play “shall be determined in this room”.

Ultimately, Ratcliffe is a specialist in this technical football matters, drawing from his background in industry and yachting. Above all he remains immensely wealthy, and as we all know, the rich are superior: more perceptive, more wise, strategically brilliant, fundamentally better. Whom else would you trust to oversee an enlightened programme of cost-cutting, the construction of a new stadium that looks a lot like someone’s leftover knitting, the signing of Benjamin Sesko?

A Modern Soccer Hierarchy: Directors Above Managers

This is a trend we are increasingly seeing in top-tier of the game. Historically, clubs foolishly delegated big footballing decisions to low-level employees such as coaches, scouts – even footballers. Maybe previously feasible for a young, visionary coach with a philosophy and energy to join a club and see their vision through to completion. Yet how many companies have these guys established? What number of mass redundancies have they managed? Better by far to invest the real power where it rightly belongs: the leadership tier, the open-necked shirt brigade, the guys with the jaw-dropping LinkedIn profiles. It is wiser to determine the strategy by the directors and appoint someone who will adapt their offering to suit. If managers were formerly chefs, they are now more akin to delivery personnel: not creating the food, yet ultimately answerable if it arrives cold or leaks out of the box.

Nowadays, a coach's role is increasingly less about defining the vision and more about marketing it: the receptionist of the operation, the public face of an organisation they can do little to influence. A coach at Chelsea takes a squad of literal children into the Champions League and wins two medium-sized trophies, and effectively is dismissed for speaking out. Wilfried Nancy sees his standing damaged while those individuals who appointed him live to blunder another day.

A Neoliberal Game: Responsibility for the Few

And perhaps in a small way this represents neoliberalism in action: the rise of a gilded overclass who are infallible, whose decisions are always sacrosanct, whose mistakes can invariably be resolved by sacking without justification. Appoint the 3-4-3 coach and then fire them for playing too much that system. Bring in the project manager and then discard them for taking excessive time. And above all show gratitude; for the incremental season ticket price rises, for your new summer signings, for the fact that the grownups – however well qualified – are in charge.