Every industry is plagued by well-paid suits with pointy tan shoes and big job titles. Do Man Utd need a ‘director of football insights and innovations’?It may have caught your notice that the former head of the Post Office was giving evidence to the Horizon inquiry last week, and an extended self-serving diatribe it was, wrapped up in self-pity and spectacular, unconvincing, dishonest memory loss.
Apart from the moral vacuity and sheer bastardry on display, it revealed the low, low quality of CEOs in this country. This woman was earning hundreds of thousands of pounds but seemed to do nothing for it except throw loads of perfectly innocent people in jail for crimes they hadn’t committed, it not seeming to occur to her that so many managers simultaneously deciding to start stealing on the introduction of the Horizon system all at once was, to say the least, questionable.
There are nine non-executive directors – what are they all doing? There is a ‘Director of football insights and innovations’. The club has shown very little insight in its appointments and decisions and what the hell have been the innovations? Why is this person picking up a wage? Like Paula Vennels, he seems to get paid for nothing.
Self-important titles are a clue to what is really going on. Many clubs end up being run to flatter the ego of the owner or CEO and are bloated and inefficient. As United have shown, you don’t get away with it in the league. If you are a badly run shambles off the pitch, you end up with a vague, inconsistent, characterless team, which drifts and is assembled haphazardly. This season has shown us that quite clearly. You get some good results but no consistency.