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Turns out the manager endured defeat by Grimsby. He weathered an important continental showpiece versus a particularly poor Spurs sides for many years. He withstood home defeats against domestic rivals, a lowly league position, an unwavering system, undermining the team's most promising academy products, a poor winning percentage, labeling his team the poorest the club has ever seen. Yet, there existed a single opponent against whom the Portuguese coach would not be allowed to engage. If you challenge Jason Wilcox, you had better succeed.

Unfortunately, similar to numerous top-flight defender in Blackburn’s title-winning campaign, Amorim came at Jason Wilcox and appears to have missed. The most casual observer can see the paradoxical situation: a manager who frequently berated at his players 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.

And frankly, this entire painful saga appears to portray the director in a whole new light. It may have been tempting, given his nine months of experience at Southampton, to view him as little more than a drudge in the United exoskeleton: an individual whose appointment was due largely to his friendship with his former boss a fellow executive rather than any verifiable talent. How wrong everyone was. By masterfully outmanoeuvring the club's celebrated head coach, as he outmanoeuvred the hapless Dan Ashworth earlier, he has proved himself as one of the sport’s strategic masterminds: a tactical intellect that the club's mid-table rivals will now be rightly wary.

The Tactical Clash Over System and Ideology

To illustrate, this was the director who being involved in the hierarchy that hired the 3-4-3 fundamentalist Amorim originally, was instrumental in trying to persuade him to ditch his beloved 3-4-3. Naturally, these entreaties faced pushback. However, such directives carry more weight when delivered by a man of a man the unimpeachable soccer background of Jason Wilcox, a veteran of three England caps and a role in a championship team decades past.

Maybe eventually Jason Wilcox may be persuaded to outline his reasoning to the rest of us. Perhaps at some point he might be asked why Amorim is walking away with a full payout, without any compensation reduction clause in place. But Jason Wilcox seldom speaks in public, and with very good reason. The true intellectuals of this sport – men like him – simply operate on a plane exceeding our prosaic understanding. Were he to speak, probably all we would hear would be ultrasonic blips and complex calculations. Wanting is not equivalent to being prepared to comprehend it.

An Supreme Power Behind Command

Naturally, in training our focus on Jason Wilcox we are obscuring the real power behind the club's current leadership. The director is, in reality, simply carrying out the commands of his superior Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who privately has emphasized his desire for a back four. It is reported, 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, during a leadership summit early in his minority ownership, he declared that the team's approach of play “will be decided by this group”.

Ultimately, Ratcliffe is a specialist in these intricate footballing stuff, drawing from his previous experience in petrochemicals and yachting. Above all he is immensely wealthy, and it is known, the rich are superior: more insightful, more wise, strategically brilliant, fundamentally superior. Who else would you trust to manage a strategic plan of cost-cutting, the construction of a modern arena that appears a lot like someone’s leftover knitting, the signing of Benjamin Sesko?

A New Soccer Order: Executives Above Coaches

This represents a shift we are increasingly seeing 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, visionary coach with ideas and drive to go into an organization and implement their plan through to completion. Yet how many companies have such individuals set up? What number of mass redundancies have they managed? Better by far to place genuine authority where it rightly belongs: the leadership tier, the casually dressed executives, the individuals with the jaw-dropping LinkedIn profiles. It is wiser to determine the tactics in the boardroom and appoint someone who can tailor their methods accordingly. If coaches were once chefs, they are now more akin to Deliveroo drivers: not really creating the product, but still ultimately answerable should it be delivered cold or leaks out of the box.

In the meantime, a coach's role has become less about defining the vision 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 Europe and wins two medium-sized trophies, and essentially gets sacked for speaking out. Wilfried Nancy finds his standing damaged whereas those individuals who appointed him continue to make errors indefinitely.

The Modern Corporate Football: Responsibility Only for the Few

And possibly in a small way this represents neoliberalism at work: the rise of a gilded overclass who can never be wrong, whose decisions are always untouchable, whose errors can invariably be resolved by sacking without explanation. Hire the 3-4-3 coach only to dismiss them for using too much that system. Bring in the project manager and then bin him for requiring excessive time. And above all show gratitude; for your modest season ticket price rises, for your new summer signings, for the reality that the adults – regardless of their expertise – remain in control.