Quite a few people seem to be enjoying the sacking of Dan Ashworth as Manchester United's football director, don't they? The delightful farce of a man who spends almost as much time on garden leave before taking a job as he actually does.
These people will tell you that United are bigger and better than a man like Ashworth. Too important to need someone who, as FA technical director, wrote the plan called 'England's DNA', which survived initial ridicule to make the country's international teams successful across all age groups, after years of failure.
Well, United certainly showed Ashworth who was boss on Saturday night. He marched him through the media room at Old Trafford, in full view of the journalists, to be sacked because they simply couldn't wait until Monday. Stylish, that. And while Ashworth takes the bullet for Sir Jim Ratcliffe's disastrous first year at the helm of United, the overseer and real culprit carries on happily, isolated by the fact that he is the boss's man.
There was certainly a time when Sir Dave Brailsford put football people in their place without even trying. I remember him meeting then Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini 12 years ago – an afternoon when some of us were invited to report.
Mancini turned up late at the Manchester Velodrome looking small and insignificant in Brailsford's company. 'How do you achieve success as a team?' Mancini asked him. “By being honest, putting it out on the table and not nonsense,” Brailsford replied.
He was in his splendor at the time, having just masterminded the success of track cycling, one of the triumphs of the London Olympics. His forensic mind was perfectly suited to timed events on the track, where he could micro-manage and 'control' the controllable components. He seemed to have no interest in road cycling because of its relative unpredictability.
But Brailsford, being Brailsford – with enormous self-confidence, an equally gigantic ego and, it must be said, enormous intelligence – couldn't resist taking to the road. Ultimately he conquered that world too. His string of Tour de France successes will always be remembered more than a report into British cycling culture in 2017, which depicted him as a bullying and obnoxious figure, or a DCMS committee report accusing him of 'overstepping an ethical limit' on his drug use by cyclists.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the self-confidence in Brailsford, a man who had been showered with praise for so long, would turn into arrogance. The belief that the scientific approach to sports, which could be applied to cycling modestly paid elite athletes, could be transferred to football, a highly unpredictable and often nasty world, with endless uncontrollable issues and a high percentage of narcissists. It has certainly diluted his significance, influence and legacy.
When the INEOS road cycling team that Brailsford managed for Ratcliffe began to fail – they could not compete with the resources of the Gulf and their prodigious young Colombian rider Egan Bernal was destroyed in a crash that almost killed him – the two went assumed that they could take over football from clubs like Lausanne and Nice and teach football a thing or two. They didn't move the dial in either place. The last prize Brailsford can claim was Geraint Thomas' victory in the 2018 Tour de France for Team Sky.
It is also difficult to find evidence for Brailsford's own transmission of knowledge. One of the many sports science studies that has paid off in cycling was his discovery that athletes lose a day of peak performance for every hour of time difference when flying abroad. He promptly ordered Team GB's BMX riders to stop competing in the US. They complied and started winning more.
But during a four-day player break last month, when United were briefly without a manager, we saw Marcus Rashford watching an NBA match at Madison Square Garden in New York, and Casemiro roaming around Disney World, Florida. An image, in microcosm, of what a different world football is.
Ratcliffe says his INEOS philosophy is summarized in a 'Compass' chart that hangs on the wall at its headquarters, near Harrods in London, with 'Words We Don't Like' south on the dial. They include 'entitlement' and 'arrogance'. The idea of the cycling guru simply walking into Old Trafford and transforming football's most complex club radiates both. Look at the wall, Sir Jim, and tell us you didn't fire the wrong man on Saturday.
Football fever
FIFA has sent me the same press release ten times since Saturday. It's promoting an inscrutable exhibition at their museum in Zurich called 'Football Fever'. Chatter is chatter, no matter how many times you try to sell it.
The governing body wasn't so forthcoming when there was something important to reveal a few weeks ago. Namely that the organization's own subcommittee on human rights and social responsibility had concluded that FIFA should compensate migrant workers whose safety it had neglected while Qatar was building up its massive 2022 World Cup. And that FIFA had already decided that not to do.
FIFA's press release about that vicious decision fell into the dead zone at 11.32pm (GMT) on Friday evening – a very threadbare tactic for spin doctors looking to bury bad news.
This is what this once proud and vital organization has been reduced to under the leadership of the noxious, duplicitous, thin-skinned Gianni Infantino, who for a time lived a very comfortable life in Qatar and who will polish himself up while declaring Saudi Arabia the host country of the 2034 World Cup. FIFA's glowing report on Saudi Arabia's suitability – a whitewash – fell into insignificance that same Friday evening.
Rooney under fire
Wayne Rooney even found his parental decision-making under fire when his young sons, aged eight and six, were taken out of school to visit their mother in the I'm a Celebrity jungle in Australia.
Apparently he and his wife “set a bad example.”
My friend Kate, a brilliant teacher, now retired, who throughout her career did not skimp on determination when necessary, remarked when we met on Monday that the trip of a lifetime to another continent might just be better than a previous trip. -Christmas week at primary school, as an educational life experience for those boys.
I think she had a point.
Ratcliffe's Desert Journey
The optics are getting worse and worse and yet Sir Jim Ratcliffe doesn't seem to have the slightest ability to understand it.
It escaped much attention last weekend that in an interview with the fanzine United We Stand, intended to present him as a man of the people – 'raised on a council estate in Manchester' – he demonstrated the global significance of United by describing how he once drove. through Mongolia's Gobi Desert in a 1928 4.5-litre Bentley. Chinese customs officials recognized the name 'J Ratcliffe' on the bonnet, he claimed, and shouted 'Ah, Manchester United!' A 1928 4.5-litre Bentley costs half a million pounds, the kind of money an average United fan would earn in about 20 years. He waved it over a desert.
And today my colleague Chris Wheeler reveals how Sir Alex Ferguson, recently stripped of his United ambassadorial role, had to intervene after Sir Matt Busby's family had some of their hospitality privileges revoked, amid a lack of communication from the club.
Sir Jim had one job: to be better than the Glazers, and he failed miserably. Extraordinary to see.
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