Power, politics and Chris Wilder’s return to Bramall Lane

Wilder's re-election reflects a need not only for immediate results, but also a more coherent long-term succession plan

Words: Sam Parry

“His ability to integrate academy talent, employ innovative recruitment and analytic strategies, play an exciting brand of football, and adapt dynamically to the modern game, are all tenants we believe that the next great chapter of Sheffield United football will be built upon.” — Twitter post, from SUFC owners upon the appointment of Rubén Sellés

The Thick of It

This was the revolutionary utterance after COH Sports decided to bet the house not simply on Sellés, but on an underdeveloped plan to run a football club. Liz Truss lasted 49 days as Prime Minister, largely thanks to an underdeveloped plan to run — or ruin — an economy. The parallels are closer than you might think.

I recently left my job as a government speechwriter, working with ‘both sides’ in a role that left me questioning both my morality and sanity. It was fun though. And perhaps the biggest thing I’ll take away is that politicians, like football managers, owe more to circumstance than anything else in their control.

The ministers I worked with all carried the can. You can’t make an omelette — and by that, I mean a four-year career as a speechwriter — without breaking through 30 ministers and six secretaries of state. The only thing more ridiculous than the revolving door of perfectly pleasant and competent ministers is the rate of managerial churn in football. Is it sensible, in any business, to keep shuffling people in and out of jobs? Is there not enough patience to let people learn from mistakes? Failure is part of the job; the absurdity is how quickly it’s treated as terminal.

I say all this, but it was the right time to sack Sellés. Leaders carry the can for good reason. But in Wilder’s case, he carried the can for no good reason at all. Imagine the performance review: “yes Chris, you’ve done a grand job, 92 points, a play-off final, you should be due a pay rise, but we think it’s time for a change.” It was patently ridiculous.

Now, I wasn’t in favour of Paul Heckingbottom getting sacked. I wasn’t in favour of Chris Wilder getting sacked. Had Rubén Sellés shown anything approaching competence, I wouldn’t be in favour of his dismissal either. But here we are. Sellés failed to integrate academy talent, employ innovative recruitment and analytic strategies, play an exciting brand of football, and adapt dynamically to the modern game. As a result, CW 3.0 begins — and with it the certainty that there will be failings as well as successes.

Before we take to the pitch, what happens to those ‘tenants’ now? And, whilst I think they meant ‘tenet’, who am I to get in the way of an achingly obvious metaphor? The tenants are squatting in the boardroom, tails between legs, egos bruised and here comes a chipper Chris Wilder whose presence stinks of “told you so.” By now, the tenants have shrunk so far into the corner that we cannot tell exactly who they are. Short of a single figurehead like Prince Abdullah, it is impossible to be sure whose influence is on the wane. Who got it wrong? Who lost the argument? Whoever it was, they are still at the football club, and they won’t be squatting forever. Neither will those tenets.

I doubt the board have changed their long-term analysis: that a manager should be able to pass in and out of the club without fuss because, at its heart, off-pitch operations should not fall under a coach’s responsibility. But Wilder is a manager. And now, he is the man with all the power.

That won’t stay that way forever. Whatever aspirations the leadership group had do not vanish with Wilder’s return. The contrasting visions — Wilder on one side, the tenants on the other — must now be re-envisioned and refocused. The Third Way. It’s all very Blairite. And let’s give Wilder credit: in his dealings with two sets of crackpot owners, he has remained on good terms and not left, like I would, kicking the chair over on the way out.

Right now, Chris Wilder is politically strong. In fact, his position isn’t too dissimilar to Jeremy Corbyn after Labour’s failed coup: the ‘lefty do-gooder’ won the argument with members, then the vote, and then the leadership once more. But inside Labour HQ, as in Bramall Lane, there will remain a plot to move on. We have to hope, this time, that the leader is on board with it.

Succession

One day, Chris Wilder will leave again. But next time it cannot be a case of ripping up one plan in favour of another. This must be a partnership. Wilder’s biggest job, and his legacy, has to be leaving the club in a better place than he found it. That has already happened twice. The next time, his absence cannot be allowed to crush the club. Succession planning is not a dirty word.

Look on Twitter and you’ll find plenty of talk (some of it mine) about Wilder eventually ‘moving upstairs’. There is the kernel of a sensible plan in this. Clearly, he has a unique skillset that modern coaches do not: operations, dealmaking, living and breathing every square inch of the club, if not every training drill. The reason it cannot work is politics. Could Wilder ever loosen his grip on first-team affairs? He wants to win, his methods get results, and I don’t see why he’d ever choose to step back when there’s at least a decade of energy left in the tank. How could a new manager possibly work in Wilder’s shadow?

It feels more sensible that, one day, perhaps a few seasons from now, there is an anointing. Wilder picks. Like Fergie. The comparison may feel stupid in the context of their achievements, but Wilder’s grip on the club is not so different. When he says, “it’s my club”, I believe him. Not just as a fan, but as a manager whose fingerprints are on all of the club’s recent success — even under Paul Heckingbottom, whose work I admired a lot.

So, would he ever anoint? Might he bring someone in, someone like Keith Andrews before, a person with the talent to get a Premier League job and make a fist of it? Could he attract a talent to work under him? I hope so. But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. We haven’t got a point yet.

The Big Short

I assume it will all get better; that this is the easiest job in the world. To improve on the Sellés baseline, Wilder needs only to score two goals, take one lead, get a couple of shots on target. Expectations have been reduced so dramatically that he can succeed with relative mediocrity compared with last season.

But short of registering himself as a player, Wilder can’t score a single goal. Like Sellés, he can’t shoot or pass or tackle on the players’ behalf. As he drives into Shirecliffe after weeks of watching the mad, bad and downright cowardly performances of the squad, I wonder if he’ll feel more sorry for Sellés than some people might think. Remember what he said about those Coventry players?

“Maybe if [the players] had run around more like that before their manager might still be in a job. Whether I am being controversial about it, we knew, and maybe it’s just human nature that they would run around a little bit more today, which they did.” — Chris Wilder, after a 2-2 draw with Coventry, 2024

We hope it’s human nature that they run around a little bit more for Chris Wilder. For all the talk that the previous man ‘lost the dressing room’, we cannot know what individual players think about Wilder. But we can at least assume he arrives with enough authority to tolerate no lack of application.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

In a weird way, we’ve landed in a situation we were always going to be in no matter the identity of the manager: reduced expectations. Not a reduction to P5 W0 D0 L5, but a broader season-long reduction. The data shows a steady regression in Sheffield United performances from January last year, then a cliff edge under Sellés, and perhaps now something in between. That’s okay. It happens. Sheffield United have failed before and will do so again.

But as I’ve said before, Chris Wilder cannot deliver the goods unless he has the goods. Right now, it’s almost impossible to gauge our level. But he is not the messiah, ladies and gents, he’s a very good football manager. And very good football managers get things wrong.

No matter what happens now, even if we lose another five in a row, we cannot become a club of endless sackings. The revolving door is a destructive power in football. Wilder would be next to Pep on the list below had he never left in the first place, and the reality is that in the long run, patience pays. From Harrogate staying in the pyramid to Pep winning titles, there is a correlation between longevity and relative success. And the hard truth is simple: you have to tolerate failure too. That goes for fans. It certainly goes for the board. And with a squad this mentally weak, CW 3.0 will have to tolerate a fair bit of it in the coming months as well. As Eminem almost put it: “success is my only mother effing option… failure too.”