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Transpired the manager could survive defeat by lower-league opposition. He weathered an important continental showpiece versus a particularly poor Tottenham teams for many years. He withstood home defeats to West Ham and Wolves, finishing 15th, the tactical inflexibility, undermining the team's most promising academy products, the 32% win rate, calling the squad the poorest in Manchester United history. But there was a single opponent against whom Ruben Amorim would not be allowed to tango. If you challenge the sporting director, you had better succeed.

Unfortunately, like many a top-flight right-back during Blackburn Rovers' championship 1994-95 season, the coach took on the executive and appears to have failed. The most distracted of readers will notice the irony here: a manager who often railed his squad for losing one-on-one duels succumbing in the face of the white heat and formidable presence of a the Premier League’s most feared football executives.

In truth, this whole painful saga seems to paint Jason Wilcox in a different perspective. It may have been tempting, given his brief stint in a similar role at Southampton, to view Jason Wilcox as merely a drudge in the United exoskeleton: an individual who owed his position largely to his friendship with his former boss Omar Berrada as any verifiable talent. How mistaken we all were. By masterfully outmanoeuvring the club's celebrated manager, just as he bested the hapless Dan Ashworth before him, Jason Wilcox has demonstrated as one of the sport’s strategic masterminds: a strategic mind of which United’s competitors are now rightly wary.

The Strategic Conflict Regarding System & Philosophy

To illustrate, it was Jason Wilcox who being involved in the hierarchy that appointed the rigid 3-4-3 advocate Amorim originally, was instrumental in trying to persuade Amorim to abandon his beloved formation. Unsurprisingly, these entreaties met a certain resistance. But perhaps such directives carry more weight when delivered from the mouth of a man the impeccable football pedigree he possesses, holder of international appearances and a contributor to a championship team decades past.

Perhaps in time Jason Wilcox might agree to explain his thought processes to the rest of us. Perhaps at some point he might be asked why Amorim is walking away with full compensation, with no penalty clause in place. The director seldom speaks publicly, for excellent reasons. The real thinkers in football – men like Jason Wilcox – simply operate on a plane exceeding our mundane comprehension. 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 equivalent to being ready to receive.

An Supreme Authority Behind the Throne

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, in reality, simply carrying out the commands of his line manager the billionaire owner, who privately has made very clear his desire for a back four. According to reports, the owner has also proposed deploying the forward in a wing-back role. The owner is eager for United to adopt analytics and analytics. Per reports, during a leadership summit soon after his investment, he announced that United’s style of play “shall be determined by this group”.

After all, Sir Jim is a specialist in this technical football matters, leveraging his background in petrochemicals and sailing. Most importantly he remains immensely wealthy, and as we all know, the wealthy are superior: more insightful, sagacious, more tactically astute, simply superior. Whom else would you trust to manage an enlightened programme of austerity, the building of a modern arena that appears similar to an abstract design, the acquisition of a new striker?

A Modern Soccer Order: Directors Above Coaches

This represents a shift that is becoming prevalent at the elite levels football. Historically, clubs foolishly entrusted big footballing decisions to subordinate staff like managers, talent spotters – players themselves. Maybe previously feasible for an up-and-coming, visionary coach with a philosophy and drive to go into a club and implement their plan supported to fruition. Yet how many companies have these guys established? How many large-scale layoffs have they overseen? Far preferable to invest the real power where it rightly belongs: the executive class, the casually dressed executives, the guys with the jaw-dropping LinkedIn profiles. Better by far to determine the strategy by the directors and hire someone who will adapt their offering to suit. If managers were formerly chefs, they have become more akin to Deliveroo drivers: not creating the product, yet finally accountable should it be delivered poorly or leaks out of the box.

In the meantime, their job has become not about crafting the philosophy and more about selling it: the front-facing representative of the operation, the visible figurehead 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. A manager at Celtic finds his reputation ruined while the people who appointed him live to blunder indefinitely.

A Modern Corporate Football: Responsibility for the Few

And possibly in a small way this is simply corporate governance in action: the elevation of a privileged elite who are infallible, whose choices are always sacrosanct, whose mistakes can always be sacked away without explanation. Hire the 3-4-3 coach only to dismiss him for using too much that system. Hire the process guy and later bin him for taking excessive time. And above all be grateful; for the incremental increases in ticket costs, for your new summer signings, for the reality that the adults – however well qualified – are in charge.