Cometh the day, cometh the man. Nine months ago at Manchester United, many fans would have felt a deep ambivalence about the exit of their manager, a man who led the club for 27 years. True, he was the most successful manager in their history. True, they had just won the English Premier League, a coveted trophy even in global terms. But Sir Alex Ferguson had chosen as his successor a man who had practically won nothing. Does that matter? Not if the leader in waiting represents a similar set of values. Not if he has been carefully groomed for this step up in challenge. Not if he had been successful in his own right. But David Moyes was none of the above. What was it that Ferguson saw in his this protege? A steady and un-flamboyant man with steely Scottish grit. A man of character. Someone who had led a second tier club for 11 years and kept them close to the top of English football. It was a fair bet. But it was wrong. Why?

Easy to sit here and write obituaries after the event. Told you so ain’t clever. But it is easy to see why what happened was always going to be this way. And it is not the fault of either man, it is a problem with the football system. In organisational life, succession starts happening almost as soon as a leader takes a position. In football it’s all about personality. In companies, leaders are groomed and inculcated with the culture of the organisation. In football clubs managers are bought. When leaders are hired from the outside in the business world, they inevitably fail. Nine out of ten successful companies build a succession pipeline from within. Moreover, Moyes inherited a team of winners, a team with whom Ferguson had just won a league trophy, a team he had bought built and nurtured like a father. How on earth could Moyes improve? He was a dead man walking from day one. If football clubs want to become more profitable and look less clumsy they would do well to think about building a managerial pipeline off the field to complement the youth pipeline on it. Not to do so not only destroys value, but sets them back years.