Jim Ratcliffe's Manchester United Won’t Find a Savior

The world’s richest soccer league has begun the year with a bout of managerial turmoil. Manchester United, currently standing seventh in the English Premier League, fired its head coach Ruben Amorim on Monday, a few days after Chelsea, one place lower in eighth, parted company with Enzo Maresca. Both exited part-way through their contracts after clashing with club hierarchies. The parallels between the two teams, which are both struggling to recapture past dominance, are instructive: The era of the omnipotent football manager has faded into history — but not everyone got the memo.

Successful managers once bestrode their clubs like colossuses, with a say over virtually every aspect of how the operation was run. The most celebrated example in recent history is Alex Ferguson, who won a record 13 Premier League titles in 26 years with Man Utd before retiring in 2013. His shadow hangs over the club in the same way that Jack Welch’s legacy once dogged future chief executive officers of General Electric Co. — a leader who presided over a period of such consistent outperformance that successors were condemned to suffer by comparison.