But he somewhat did that on a green field as far as I know. He doesn't have experience in dismantling a disaster of a squad for example, and if I'm not mistaken he never fired a manager before. Which is something that obviously had to happen at United.
In a way I think he joined the club too early. He could probably have done a good job at building and improving structures throughout the club, but he wasn't the right one for the high pressure "open heart surgery" the first team and staff needed (and still need).
I get the horses for course line of your argument here, and Ashworth was definitely the wrong hire for the club. All the information you need to make that conclusion is the fact that we fought a war with Newcastle to get him and let him go after less than half a season. But the reason he was the wrong hire, in my opinion of course, was not because of his profile or experience as a professional and the job required at United, but rather because Ratcliffes timelines for developing United and his management style was not suited for someone of Ashworths temperament. And others probably pounced on this clash between him and Ratcliffe to sideline and eventually get him sacked.
However, I don't think you need to have experience firing a manager in order to be able to do so at this level. By that logic we should have hired a sporting director who has fired lots of managers - but that obviously doesn't sound right as a job qualification either. I also question the line of thinking that we the only way forward is open heart surgery in this immediate, combustive fashion that INEOS has mandated at the club. In my opinion, that takes a management
choice and elevates it to a necessity that guides any further discussion.
There is no doubt that we are in financial deep waters because of past mismanagement, and the collective talent level in our squad currently doesn't make the cut for top five in the league and more importantly has been assembled with no coherent plan. But was the bloat, slack, whatever in the club really at a level where we needed to cull 25 percent of the staff here and now? Was it necessary to cancel the Christmas party and take away minor staff bonuses? Could we have spent less in the summer and accepted a longer time horizon on refreshing the squad and rebuilding the organization, culture and so on? Can a club like United choose to remove the veneer of ultimate ambition in the short term in favor of accepting a longer development period and communicating accordingly? Sure, there will be risk. Sponsors might get cold feet, it could be more challenging to recruit certain player profiles and so on, but it might also create stability and perhaps reduce the external expectations somewhat if you choose another narrative.
I don't disagree that the club needed and still needs open heart surgery. But even that can be done in more ways than one.
You can carefully put together a team of top surgeons, allow them time to discuss the best way forward in order to safeguard the patients health in both the immediate post-operation period as well as their longer term rehabilitation. And then let said experts perform the actual surgery according to their assessment of the required time for the procedure, while respecting their need for a calm working environment and sufficient levels of nursing staff that allows them to focus their minds on the very specialized task at hand.
You can also lock a bunch of people with a broad range of medical experience in a room, tell them they have an hour to figure out how to perform the operation in a way that will allow the patient to be running a marathon six months after being out of surgery, all the while different people are walking in and out of the room playing bagpipes and banging steel drums as hard as humanly possible. And when it's time to actually perform the surgery you could choose to be looking over their shoulder the whole time, questioning every incision and tapping your watch, while dismissing a new member of the nursing team every 15 mins.
