Turns out he endured losing against lower-league opposition. He weathered an important European final versus a particularly poor Spurs sides in living memory. He withstood home defeats to West Ham and Wolves, finishing 15th, the tactical inflexibility, laying waste to some of the club’s most promising academy products, the 32% win rate, labeling his team the poorest the club has ever seen. Yet, there existed one adversary with whom Ruben Amorim was not permitted to dance. If you challenge Jason Wilcox, and you best not miss.
Unfortunately, like many a Premiership right-back during Blackburn Rovers' title-winning 1994-95 season, the coach came at Jason Wilcox and appears to have missed. Even the most casual observer can see the irony here: a coach who often railed his squad for failing in individual battles succumbing when confronted by the intense pressure and formidable presence of a the Premier League’s most feared sporting directors.
And frankly, this entire painful saga appears to portray the director in a different perspective. Perhaps it might have been easy, based on his nine months in a similar role with the Saints, to regard Jason Wilcox as merely a functionary in the United exoskeleton: an individual who owed his position as much to his close relationship with ex-colleague Omar Berrada rather than any verifiable talent. How mistaken we all were. In brilliantly outsmarting the club's celebrated head coach, just as he bested the unfortunate Dan Ashworth earlier, Jason Wilcox has proved himself as one of football's strategic masterminds: a tactical intellect of which the club's mid-table rivals will now be rightly wary.
For example, it was the director , after having been part of the hierarchy that appointed the rigid 3-4-3 advocate the coach in the first place, played a key role in attempting to convince him to ditch his beloved formation. Unsurprisingly, these pleas were resisted. However, such directives carry more weight when issued by a man with the unimpeachable soccer background he possesses, holder of international appearances and a role in a championship team decades past.
Perhaps in time Jason Wilcox may be persuaded to outline his thought processes to the rest of us. Maybe one day he might be asked regarding why the coach is departing with a full payout, without any compensation reduction clause activated. The director speaks rarely in public, for excellent reasons. The true intellectuals in football – men like him – simply operate at a level beyond our own mundane comprehension. Were he to speak, probably all we would hear would be ultrasonic blips and complex calculations. Wanting is not quite the same as being ready to receive.
But of course, in training our focus on Jason Wilcox we are obscuring the real power behind the modern United throne. Jason Wilcox is, in reality, simply carrying out the commands of his ultimate superior the billionaire owner, who in private has emphasized his desire for a four-man defense. According to reports, the owner has also suggested deploying the forward in a wing-back role. The owner is eager for United to adopt analytics and metrics. Per reports, in an executive meeting early in his minority ownership, he declared that the team's approach of play “will be decided by this group”.
After all, Sir Jim is an expert in this technical football matters, leveraging his background in industry and yachting. Above all he is immensely wealthy, and as we all know, the wealthy are the best of us: more insightful, sagacious, strategically brilliant, simply superior. Whom else could one trust to manage a strategic plan of austerity, the building of a modern arena that appears similar to an abstract design, the signing of a new striker?
This represents a shift that is becoming prevalent in top-tier of the game. Historically, teams mistakenly delegated big footballing decisions to subordinate staff such as coaches, scouts – even footballers. Maybe previously feasible for a young, innovative manager with a philosophy and drive to go into an organization and implement their plan supported to fruition. Yet how many businesses have such individuals set up? How many large-scale layoffs 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 the jaw-dropping professional resumes. It is wiser to determine the strategy by the directors and appoint someone who will adapt their methods accordingly. If coaches were once chefs, they are now more akin to delivery personnel: not creating the food, but still ultimately answerable if it arrives cold or leaks out to meet standards.
Nowadays, a coach's role is increasingly less about defining the vision and more about selling it: the receptionist 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. Wilfried Nancy sees his reputation ruined whereas those individuals who appointed him continue to make errors indefinitely.
And possibly on some microcosmic level this is simply corporate governance at work: the rise of a privileged overclass who can never be wrong, whose decisions are always sacrosanct, whose errors can invariably be sacked away without justification. Hire the system coach only to fire him for playing excessively that system. Hire the project manager and later discard them for taking excessive time. And above all show gratitude; for the incremental season ticket price rises, for the latest summer signings, for the reality that the grownups – regardless of their expertise – are in charge.
