loading . . . Paul Grech (@paulgrech) Enzo Maresca works under a microscope that seems permanently switched on before opting to leave / being pushed out .Ruben Amorim loses his job. Arne Slot feels the early tremors of impatience. Different clubs, different contexts, same outcome: the head coach absorbs the shock while those who shaped the project remain in the background.
This is now English football. The league that previously rejected the idea of sporting directors has now fallen in love with them to the extent that they often feel untouchable. More than that, they are inaccessible and insulated from all that happens on the pitch despite their roles.
The dismissal of Ruben Amorim followed this script precisely. Amorimâs reputation was built on coherence: a clear tactical framework, a strong link between recruitment and game model, and an ability to develop players within defined constraints.
When that coherence failed to materialise, the explanation quickly narrowed down to his inability to change. As if that was not known beforehand by those who got him into the club, the reckoning stopped at the dugout.
Enzo Maresca was the same, tasked with imposing structure on a squad assembled across multiple windows, with varying profiles, price points, and timelines. And little coherence. Consistency was expected even when the raw materials pulled in opposing directions.
With Arne Slot, the pressure is different. He has the cushion of a league title won last year but whatever credit that gave is eroding fast as his side fails to gather momentum, dragged down by an imbalanced squad that was was transformed over the summer.
In all cases, the managers have to shoulder their responsibilities; all made their own poor decisions.
Yet what links these cases is not just managerial inadequacy, but asymmetry of accountability. Sporting directors and recruitment teams make decisions with long tails. They choose age curves, wage structures, contract lengths, and player profiles. They decide whether a squad is built for stability, transition, or opportunistic upside. These choices shape what is possible on the pitch, yet there is never the opportunity to interrogate them with the same intensity as a team selection or a late substitution.
For, whilst English clubs may now embrace the role of sporting director, they have not adopted all of the traits of their European counterparts. In the Bundesliga, sporting directors routinely engage with media in mixed zones after matches and give interviews to broadcasters before and after games. Directors in the Serie A, La Liga and Ligue 1 also speak regularly: they all have to explain their decisions.
In acting this way, English football has turned its managers into little more than cannon fodder. They are exposed and endlessly interrogated, while those who make the defining decisions remain insulated from consequence.
Worse still, they remain silent.
There is no explanation of strategy much less any acknowledgement of mistakes. Fans are asked to trust a process they are never allowed to see or understand. And when trust erodes, as it inevitably does, the blame falls once again on the figure in the dugout, not on those who designed the conditions that made failure predictable. https://substack.com/@paulgrech/note/c-195480914?r=1e4se&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
