Sacking Managers Quickly Teaches The Wrong Lesson About Leadership

Leadership isn’t built on a straight line, yet two of the biggest clubs in world football keep pretending it is. We dive into why Manchester United’s decision to move on from Rúben Amorim and Celtic’s thirty-three-day tenure for Wilfrid Nancy signal a deeper problem with how elite sport treats patience, culture, and accountability. Drawing on the lived reality inside high-pressure clubs, we examine how constant resets stall player development, erode identity, and turn “culture” into a slogan rather than a system you can train against every day.

We walk through the familiar United cycle: big promises of structure and renewal, followed by turbulence in a squad assembled across regimes, then a fast verdict before coherence forms. At Celtic, the burden of history shapes expectations so tightly that anything short of immediate dominance reads as failure. Across both, the message is loud: leadership is conditional on the moment; patience is negotiable only when you are winning. That mindset doesn’t just unsettle dressing rooms; it teaches players to wait out ideas, dampens youth pathways, and nudges recruitment toward short-term patches over long-term fit.

From a Sport for Business lens, the contrast with corporate transformation is stark. In business, strategy horizons run in years, leaders are judged on trajectory and decision quality, and milestones are communicated and protected. Football talks like that but often acts in panic. We argue for accountability with context: clear milestones, aligned recruitment, and enough runway for ideas to embed. If sport wants to model resilience, teamwork, and perseverance, it must live those values when the noise is loudest, not just quote them on media days.

Catch the full analysis, then tell us: do you back patience with standards, or believe rapid change is the only way to compete? If this resonated, subscribe, share with a friend who cares about football culture, and leave a quick review to help more people find the show.

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Chapters

• 0:34 Welcome And 2026 Scope
• 1:09 Headlines Across Irish Sport
• 1:38 Opinion Focus: Leadership In Football
• 2:08 United’s Dismissal Of Amorim
• 4:10 Celtic And The Burden Of History
• 6:01 Values Versus Volatility In Sport
• 7:12 Business Lens On Long-Term Strategy
• 9:10 Closing And Event Invitation

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:34

Hello and welcome to the first Sport for Business Podcast of 2026. I'm your host, Rob Hartnett, and on a daily basis we produce a podcast which is related to the commercial world of Irish sport. There will be interviews with personnel involved in that side of things and with athletes, and we hope that we provide you with a good insight into what is happening in our world. You can catch up with all of the content that we produce in written and in audio or video form at sportforbusiness.com. Catching up after the Christmas break, we have a Sport for Business A Z of 2026 key areas of interest. We catch up on the Leckwoodstown Christmas attendance record, on the League of Ireland attendances from 2025, the darts lineup being confirmed for Belfast and Dublin in the Premier League. A new partnership for Basketball Ireland, a new expansion for the League of Ireland, and a new appointment for Horse Sport Ireland. But in today's podcast, we're doing a read-through of an opinion piece which we wrote yesterday evening on the troubling signalling of short-term action and leadership, as evidenced by the releasing of football managers at two of the most popular clubs from Britain in Ireland, Manchester United and Celtic. I hope you enjoy the content and uh look forward to engaging with you over the course of 2026. If sport is to be held up as a meaningful example of how we live our lives, conduct ourselves, and organise as a society, then the events of the first day back to work, or not, as the case may be, in the English Premier League and the Scottish Premiership, the world of football management, deserve some scrutiny. The decisions by Manchester United and Glasgow Celtic to part ways with their managers are reflections of how modern sport treats leadership, pressure, and responsibility, and of the self-fulfilling damage that short-term thinking can inflict over the longer period. Both clubs carry extraordinary historical weight. They are not just sporting organizations, but cultural institutions bound up in identity, community, and memory. Every managerial appointment at Old Trafford or Celtic Park is framed as a chapter in a much longer story. That context matters because history amplifies expectations, it compresses patience, and often distorts judgment. At Manchester United, the dismissal of Reuben Amorim feels painfully familiar. Once again, a coach was recruited on the promise of philosophy, structure, and renewal. Amorim's reputation was built on system building, player development, and a clarity of the ideas that he has in regards to how the game should be played, precisely the attributes that United have publicly said they crave after more than a decade of drift in the post-Alex Ferguson era. Yet he inherited a squad assembled across multiple regimes, an environment shaped by constant scrutiny, and a club still negotiating what it actually wants to be. In that context, short-term turbulence was not just possible, but in many ways predictable. To remove the manager before coherence could realistically emerge risks reinforcing the very instability the club claims it wants to escape. Celtic's decision to move on from Wilfrid Nancy carries its own distinct symbolism. Less than two months into his tenure, thirty-three days, Nancy's profile aligns with much of what modern sport claims to value. He's an intelligent football brain. He trusts in his players, and he brings an emotional intelligence and long-term development to the table. At a club that regularly speaks about its connection to community, identity and style, his appointment felt philosophically consistent. But Celtic's history is both its strength and its burden. Dominance is expected, progress is assumed, and any deviation from the familiar rhythm of success is experienced not as a phase, but as failure. In such an environment, the context is often crowded out by urgency, albeit thirty-three days is pretty extreme. Even thoughtful leadership can become expendable if it does not immediately align with the inherited standards set by decades of success, and this is where the damage begins. Sport regularly positions itself as a teacher of values. We encourage participation because it builds resilience, teamwork, and perseverance. We point to elite sport as a model of accountability and performance under pressure. But when two of the most storied clubs in world football default so quickly to dismissal, the lesson taught is a different one that leadership is conditional on the moment and patience is negotiable only in victory. The contradiction is stark. Both Manchester United and Celtic talk about culture. Both invoke their history, yet culture cannot be installed instantly, and history cannot be honored without understanding how different the present is from the past. When managers are removed before ideas have time to embed, culture becomes a slogan rather than a practice. There is also a practical cost. Frequent managerial change disrupts squads, stalls development pathways, and encourages short-term decision making on the part of the club as well as players who might otherwise be attracted towards going there. Players learn to wait out systems rather than commit to them. Youth becomes risk, innovation becomes optional, and over time identity erodes to be replaced by a cycle of reset and disappointment. From a societal perspective, the signal is troubling. Sport is one of the most visible leadership laboratories we have. When it normalizes rapid dismissal in response to challenge, it reinforces a broader narrative that failure is intolerable rather than instructive. That pressure must be escaped rather than managed. That progress is linear, not iterative. None of this is to argue that managers should be immune from consequence. Elite sport is results driven, and with privilege comes responsibility. Supporters invest emotionally, owners invest financially, and expectations are very, very real. But accountability without context becomes volatility, and volatility is rarely a foundation for sustainable success. From a sport for business perspective, the irony is hard to miss. In business, transformation is understood to take time. Strategy is measured in years, not in weeks. Leaders are assessed on trajectory, decision making, and culture as much as on quarterly outcomes. Sport, despite its rhetoric, often denies itself that discipline. The added weight of history at clubs like Man United and Celtic makes this even more acute. These institutions trade on legacy, yet behave in ways that undermine continuity. They invoke the past while acting in perpetual reaction to the present. If sport is to continue to be held up as a force for good, a space where values are lived, not just marketed, then alignment between words and actions matters. Every managerial sacking teaches a lesson. Right now, too often, the lesson is not how to lead through adversity, but how quickly even the most storied institutions lose their nerve when leadership is tested. Thanks for taking the time to listen to today's Sport for Business Podcast. You can subscribe, comment, and get involved wherever you get your podcasts from. If you want to see what Sport for Business is about in person, our first major event of the year, the Sporting Year Ahead 2026, in partnership with Taneo, is taking place at the Sugar Club in Dublin on the morning of Wednesday, January the 21st. We'll have great speakers, a great room full of leaders from the sporting and business communities, and a real opportunity to kickstart your year and expand your network. Tickets are available at sportforbusiness.com and we look forward perhaps to seeing you there.

SPEAKER_00: 9:07

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