Gavin Cooney

FAREWELL THEN TO Enzo Maresca and Ruben Amorim, two of the highest-profile English football figures ever to be sacked for their lack of corporate synergy. 

Neither were dismissed solely because of their own limitations or poor results, but because of their respective tensions with the layer of management above them. 

Guys, if you can’t work with us, then we are afraid that we can’t work with you. 

Amorim voiced his frustration with all of this by complaining he was in England to be the manager of Manchester United, not the coach. That he signed a contract for the role of ‘Head Coach’ was really a mere detail: Amorim was telling the world that he was here to make the decisions about the team, and wouldn’t listen to mandarins like Jason Wilcox tell him he might benefit from switching to a back four. 

Maresca was meanwhile a goner from the moment he complained of a lack of support from the club, having apparently grown sick of the club telling him to follow the instructions of the medical staff to the letter. 

That these giant clubs are best run by committee has been widely accepted as another reality of modern football, even if it means Chelsea making logical the appointment on a six-year contract a coach whose experience is limited to the upper mid-tables of the Championship and Ligue Un. 

You ask us if Liam Rosenior’s appointment will work? Who cares. The point is he can work with us.

Of the manag- sorry, coaches in the mix to succeed Amorim on a permanent basis, Thomas Tuchel is by a distance the contender with the best pedigree at the highest level and, crucially, the coach most like to pay the least heed to The Overlap and the media’s grand sweep of United punditocracy. He also has a track record of falling out with his superiors, which might put the kibosh on his being hired by Jim Ratcliffe’s corporate Camelot. 

The ultimate purpose of these structures is to reduce the importance of the manager, and render them just a cog in a smooth machine. If United decided on this direction out of sheer nihilism or dejection -a kind of, ‘look we can’t seem to hire a good manager so why not make the whole manager idea obsolete instead’ – then it might be an understandable strategy. But instead they seem to have looked at other clubs and magpied ideas. 

There is no proof that a structure in which the manager is made a subservient employee actually works at the elite end of English football.

Brentford and Brighton have successfully built these models, but they have done so as a means of evolution owing to their position in the food chain. They know that as soon as anyone does well – be it player, coach, or executive – they will be snatched by a wealthier club, meaning they need some kind of holy structure that can survive anybody’s exit, given how frequent those exits are likely to be. These are not structures built to strive for the ultimate success, but structures built to endure success. 

But what works in mid-table does not necessarily work at the top end. Salaries are sufficiently high at Chelsea and United to ensure that there are very few alternative options to which any coach or player can ascend, meaning the unimpeachability of the club structure is based on a mid-table mindset. 

Consistent success at the elite end of English football remains as it has been since the days of Alex Ferguson: the manager has to be the most important person at the club. 

Look at the three most consistently successful teams since Ferguson’s retirement, and all are prefaced with the name of their manager. Guardiola’s City, Klopp’s Liverpool, and Arteta’s Arsenal. 

Yes, Guardiola walked into an elaborate structure at City, but it was imported from Barcelona effectively as a concierge service to allow him do his best work. 

Klopp worked very successfully with Liverpool’s various departments for a while, before it began to break up. Post-Klopp, the various executives have reassembled, hired a coach whose name is a verb for his functioning in their structure, and have seen the team collapse on the pitch. 

Arteta, meanwhile, was backed after his lengthy early problems, actually promoted from head coach to manager, and given the power to build this giant squad now hurtling to the title. 

All three have had to delegate certain roles around scouting, recruitment and specialist coaching, but none have had any of the above dictated to them by their employers. 

For all the besuited middle managers at these clubs try to argue otherwise, football management is still dependent on enormous talent and remains a realm of genius and of brilliance. 

The Great Man theory of history is greatly flawed and easily contradicted (not least the fact that its greatest proponent, historian Thomas Carlyle, explained the whole concept in the context of a glorifying biography of Oliver Cromwell) but it still applies to football management. 

Carlyle railed against the Enlightenment thought that nature was inherently reasonable and thus all we really had to do was to pay attention to it, but instead saw it as pure chaos, and only Great Men could go out into the world and put order on it. He rejected what he saw as “mechanical” constructs like, well, parliament (again, he could have found a better case study) and instead hailed “dynamic” men like, er, Cromwell. (To repeat: a citation does not mean an endorsement.) 

But football, for all the collusion of data analysts and VAR operators in trying to prove otherwise, is not a wholly reasonable and ordered thing. It is a chaotic and random game played by human beings, and nothing about that can be easily demystified and completely solved by a committee. 

These corporate structures at football clubs cannot run from the reality they are built to fruitlessly ignore. There is such a thing as individual genius, and while that genius is not perfect nor total nor beyond reproach, it is that which will be ultimately successful. 

At the very elite end of the game, the job is still predicated on finding brilliant men. Which is bad news for the corporate class so afraid of failing in trying to find them.