Ajax and Lyon are great case studies into why football has devolved into a broken sport masquerading as bad business. The elite aren’t the elite because they have some grand masters behind the scenes (some do, most don’t). Majority of football clubs are run exceptionally poorly. It’s a grand combination of luck, basic planning, staying the course and opportunity. Ajax wanted to make serious changes after last season and got someone who was regarded as a smart mind. Then he starts attempting to tear everything down so he could do favors for his buddies. John Textor bought Lyon and tried to run it like Clearlake did with Chelsea but without extreme investment. Their situation is exactly where Chelsea would be if it weren’t for ownership ceding control to the directors they hired.

So many bad transfers happen in football because of ego, ulterior motives, vested interests, favours, an absence of planning, arrogance, panic, injuries, doing transfers just to please a rabid fan base in an age where the transaction has quickly become more popular than the actual sport. But it’s made especially worse when the egos involved are too volatile and act like they know better because, well, they got in their position somehow so clearly they’re the geniuses and we don’t know more than them.

It’s why it always kills me when people idolize managers or sporting directors. As if they’re infallible human beings as opposed to flawed humans like the rest of us trying to do what their version of right is.