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Tbecame clear Ruben Amorim endured a loss to Grimsby. He weathered losing a crucial European final against one of the worst Tottenham teams for many years. He could survive home defeats to West Ham and Wolves, a lowly league position, an unwavering system, squandering the team's best academy products, 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 dance. You come at Jason Wilcox, and you best not miss.

Unfortunately, like many a top-flight right-back during Blackburn Rovers' championship 1994-95 season, Amorim took on the executive and appears to have missed. Even the most distracted of readers can see the paradoxical situation: a manager who often railed at his players for failing in individual battles succumbing in the face of the white heat and animal charisma of one of the Premier League’s most intimidating football executives.

In truth, this entire painful saga seems to paint Jason Wilcox in a different perspective. It may have been tempting, given his nine months in a similar role at Southampton, to regard him as merely a functionary in the United exoskeleton: an individual who owed his position as much to his friendship with his former boss Omar Berrada rather than any demonstrable skill. How wrong we all were. By masterfully outmanoeuvring United’s feted head coach, as he outmanoeuvred the unfortunate a previous executive before him, Jason Wilcox has demonstrated as one of the sport’s true generals: a tactical intellect of which United’s competitors are now rightly wary.

A Strategic Conflict Regarding System and Ideology

To illustrate, it was Jason Wilcox who having been part of the hierarchy that appointed the rigid 3-4-3 advocate the coach originally, played a key role in trying to persuade him to ditch his favored 3-4-3. Naturally, these entreaties were resisted. But perhaps such directives carry more weight when issued from the mouth of a man the unimpeachable soccer background he possesses, holder of international appearances and a role in a title-winning side decades past.

Maybe eventually Jason Wilcox might agree to explain his thought processes publicly. Perhaps at some point he might be asked regarding why the coach is walking away with full compensation, without any compensation reduction clause in place. But Jason Wilcox speaks rarely in public, for excellent reasons. The real thinkers of this sport – men like Jason Wilcox – function on a plane exceeding our mundane comprehension. Were he to speak, most likely all we would hear would be high-frequency signals and four-dimensional whirring. Wanting is not quite equivalent to being prepared to receive.

An Supreme Authority In the Throne

But of course, in training our focus on the sporting director we are obscuring the true genius behind the club's current leadership. The director is, in reality, simply carrying out the commands of his line manager the billionaire owner, who privately has made very clear his preference for a four-man defense. According to reports, Ratcliffe has also suggested deploying the forward in a wing-back role. Ratcliffe is keen for United to embrace data science and metrics. According to ESPN, in an executive meeting soon after his minority ownership, he announced that United’s style to football “shall be determined in this room”.

After all, Ratcliffe is a specialist in these intricate footballing stuff, leveraging his background in petrochemicals and yachting. Most importantly he is incredibly rich, and it is known, the rich are superior: more perceptive, sagacious, more tactically astute, simply superior. Whom else would you trust to manage an enlightened programme of cost-cutting, the building of a new stadium that appears similar to an abstract design, the signing of a new striker?

A New Soccer Order: Directors Above Coaches

This represents a shift that is becoming prevalent in top-tier of the game. For decades, teams mistakenly entrusted big footballing decisions to subordinate staff like managers, scouts – players themselves. Perhaps it was once feasible for an up-and-coming, innovative manager with ideas and drive to go into an organization and see their vision through to completion. But how many businesses have such individuals established? What number of large-scale layoffs have they managed? Far preferable to invest genuine authority where it belongs: the executive class, the open-necked shirt brigade, the guys with the jaw-dropping LinkedIn profiles. It is wiser to determine the tactics in the boardroom and appoint someone who will adapt their offering accordingly. If coaches were once chefs, they are now more like delivery personnel: not responsible for the food, but still ultimately answerable if it arrives cold or leaks out to meet standards.

Nowadays, their job is increasingly less about defining the vision and more about marketing it: the front-facing representative of the operation, the visible figurehead for a club they can do little to change. Enzo Maresca takes a squad of very young players into Europe and secures two medium-sized trophies, and effectively gets sacked for speaking out. A manager at Celtic finds his standing damaged while those individuals who appointed him continue to make errors indefinitely.

A Modern Corporate Football: Responsibility for the Few

And possibly in a small way this represents neoliberalism at work: the rise of a privileged overclass who are infallible, whose decisions are always untouchable, whose errors can always be sacked away without explanation. Hire the 3-4-3 coach and then fire him for playing excessively that system. Hire the project manager and later discard them for taking too long. And most importantly be grateful; for your modest increases in ticket costs, for your new summer signings, for the reality that the grownups – regardless of their expertise – are in charge.