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Transpired the manager endured defeat by Grimsby. Survive a decisive European final versus a particularly poor Spurs sides for many years. He withstood losing at home to domestic rivals, a lowly league position, his rigid approach, laying waste to the team's most promising homegrown talent, the 32% win rate, calling his team the worst the club has ever seen. But there was one adversary against whom Ruben Amorim was not permitted to tango. You come at the sporting director, and you best not miss.

Regrettably, similar to numerous top-flight right-back in Blackburn’s championship 1994-95 season, Amorim came at Jason Wilcox and appears to have missed. The most distracted of readers can see the paradoxical situation: a coach who frequently berated at his players for failing in individual battles succumbing in the face of the white heat and formidable presence of a the Premier League’s most feared football executives.

And frankly, this entire painful saga seems to paint the director in a whole new light. It may have been easy, given his brief stint of experience at Southampton, to regard Jason Wilcox as merely a drudge in the United exoskeleton: a man whose appointment was due largely to his close relationship with his former boss Omar Berrada as any verifiable talent. How wrong we all were. In brilliantly outsmarting United’s feted manager, just as he bested the unfortunate a previous executive earlier, Jason Wilcox has proved himself as one of the sport’s strategic masterminds: a strategic mind that United’s competitors will now be rightly wary.

The Tactical Clash Regarding System & Ideology

To illustrate, this was Jason Wilcox who being involved in the hierarchy that hired the rigid 3-4-3 advocate Amorim in the first place, played a key role in trying to persuade Amorim to abandon his favored formation. Naturally, these pleas were resisted. However, such directives hold greater authority when delivered from the mouth of a man the impeccable soccer background of Jason Wilcox, holder of international appearances and a role in a championship team decades past.

Perhaps in time Jason Wilcox might agree to explain his thought processes publicly. Maybe one day he might be asked why Amorim is walking away with full compensation, without any penalty clause in place. But Jason Wilcox speaks rarely in public, for excellent reasons. The true intellectuals of this sport – individuals such as him – simply operate on a plane beyond our own prosaic understanding. If he ever did speak, most likely we would perceive would be high-frequency signals and complex calculations. Wanting is not the same as being ready to receive.

An Ultimate Power Behind Command

But of course, in training our focus on Jason Wilcox we are obscuring the true genius behind the club's current leadership. The director is, after all, simply carrying out the commands of his ultimate line manager the billionaire owner, who privately has emphasized his desire for a back four. According to reports, Ratcliffe has also proposed 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 announced that the team's approach of play “will be determined in this room”.

Ultimately, Sir Jim is a specialist in this technical football matters, drawing from his previous experience in petrochemicals and yachting. Above all he remains incredibly rich, and as we all know, the rich are the best of us: more insightful, more wise, more tactically astute, simply better. Who else would you trust to oversee an enlightened programme of austerity, the building of a new stadium that looks similar to an abstract design, the acquisition of a new striker?

A New Soccer Hierarchy: Directors Over Managers

This is a trend that is becoming prevalent at the elite levels of the game. For decades, teams mistakenly entrusted big footballing decisions to low-level employees such as coaches, talent spotters – players themselves. Maybe previously possible for a young, visionary coach with ideas and drive to join a club and implement their plan supported to fruition. But how many businesses have these guys set up? How many mass redundancies have they managed? Better by far to place the real power where it rightly belongs: the leadership tier, the open-necked shirt brigade, the guys with impressive professional resumes. It is wiser to decide the tactics in the boardroom and hire someone who can tailor their offering to suit. If managers were formerly chefs, they are now more like delivery personnel: not really responsible for the product, but still finally accountable should it be delivered poorly or fails to meet standards.

In the meantime, their job has become less about crafting the philosophy and more about selling it: the front-facing representative of the operation, the visible figurehead of an organisation they have minimal power to change. A coach at Chelsea leads a team of very young players into the Champions League and secures domestic cups, and essentially gets sacked for talking. Wilfried Nancy finds his reputation ruined while those individuals who hired him live to blunder another day.

The Neoliberal Game: Accountability Only for the Few

And perhaps in a small way this represents neoliberalism in action: the elevation of a privileged elite who can never be wrong, whose choices remain sacrosanct, whose errors can always be resolved by sacking without justification. Hire the system coach and then dismiss him for using too much that system. Bring in the process guy and then bin him for taking excessive time. And above all show gratitude; for the incremental season ticket price rises, for the latest player acquisitions, for the reality that the grownups – regardless of their expertise – remain in control.