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Iturns out Ruben Amorim could survive losing against Grimsby. Survive an important continental showpiece versus one of the worst Spurs sides in living memory. He withstood home defeats to domestic rivals, a lowly league position, the tactical inflexibility, squandering some of the club’s best homegrown talent, the 32% win rate, calling the squad the poorest in Manchester United history. But there was a single opponent with whom the Portuguese coach would not be allowed to engage. If you challenge Jason Wilcox, and you best not miss.

Regrettably, similar to numerous top-flight defender in Blackburn’s championship campaign, Amorim took on Jason Wilcox and appears to have missed. Even the most distracted of readers will notice the irony here: a coach who often railed at his players for losing one-on-one duels succumbing in the face of the intense pressure and formidable presence of one of the Premier League’s most intimidating sporting directors.

And frankly, this whole painful saga appears to portray Jason Wilcox in a whole new light. Perhaps it might have been easy, based on his brief stint in a similar role at Southampton, to regard him as little more than a drudge within the club's structure: a man who owed his position largely to his close relationship with ex-colleague Omar Berrada rather than any demonstrable skill. How wrong everyone was. In brilliantly outsmarting the club's celebrated head coach, as he outmanoeuvred the hapless Dan Ashworth earlier, Jason Wilcox has demonstrated to be among football's strategic masterminds: a strategic mind of which United’s competitors are now rightly wary.

A Strategic Clash Regarding Formation & Philosophy

For example, this was the director , after having been part of the hierarchy that hired the rigid 3-4-3 advocate Amorim originally, played a key role in trying to persuade Amorim to abandon his favored 3-4-3. Naturally, these entreaties faced pushback. But perhaps such directives hold greater authority when delivered from the mouth of a man the impeccable soccer background of Jason Wilcox, holder of three England caps and a contributor to a championship team decades past.

Perhaps in time Jason Wilcox may be persuaded to outline 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 – men like him – simply operate at a level beyond our own mundane comprehension. If he ever did speak, probably all we would hear would be ultrasonic blips and four-dimensional whirring. Wanting is not quite equivalent to being prepared to comprehend it.

The Ultimate Authority In the Throne

Naturally, in training our focus on Jason Wilcox we overlook the real power behind the club's current leadership. The director is, in reality, simply carrying out the commands of his ultimate line manager Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who privately has made very clear his preference for a back four. According to reports, Ratcliffe has also proposed deploying the forward as a right wing-back. Ratcliffe is keen for United to adopt data science and metrics. According to ESPN, in an executive meeting soon after his minority ownership, he announced that the team's approach to football “shall be decided in this room”.

After all, Ratcliffe is a specialist in this technical football matters, drawing from his background in petrochemicals and sailing. Most importantly he is immensely wealthy, and it is known, the wealthy are the best of us: more perceptive, sagacious, more tactically astute, fundamentally superior. Whom else could one trust to oversee a strategic plan of cost-cutting, the construction of a modern arena that appears similar to an abstract design, the acquisition of Benjamin Sesko?

A Modern Football Order: Executives Above Managers

This represents a shift we are increasingly seeing at the elite levels of the game. For decades, clubs foolishly delegated major sporting choices to subordinate staff like managers, talent spotters – even footballers. Maybe previously possible for an up-and-coming, innovative manager with ideas and energy to join a club and implement their plan through to completion. Yet how many companies have these guys set up? How many mass redundancies have they overseen? Better by far to invest the real power where it belongs: the executive class, the open-necked shirt brigade, the guys with impressive LinkedIn profiles. Better by far to decide the tactics by the directors and appoint someone who can tailor their methods accordingly. If managers were once chefs, they are now more like Deliveroo drivers: not responsible for the product, but still ultimately answerable if it arrives poorly or leaks out of the box.

In the meantime, their job is increasingly less about defining the vision and more about selling it: the front-facing representative on the front desk, the public face for a club they can do little to change. Enzo Maresca leads a team of very young players into Europe and secures two medium-sized trophies, and essentially gets sacked for speaking out. A manager at Celtic finds his standing damaged whereas the people who hired him live to blunder indefinitely.

A Modern Corporate Game: Responsibility Only for the Coaches

And possibly in a small way this represents corporate governance at work: the elevation of a privileged elite who can never be wrong, whose choices remain untouchable, whose errors can invariably be resolved by sacking without justification. Hire the 3-4-3 coach only to fire them for using too much that system. Hire the project manager and then bin him for taking too long. And above all be grateful; for your modest season ticket price rises, for the latest summer signings, for the reality that the adults – however well qualified – are in charge.