Money can’t always buy success – and José Mourinho paid the price at Man Utd

If it’s broken, fix it. This was the logic followed by the Glazers, the owners of Manchester United football club, when they announced the decision to sack their manager José Mourinho on Tuesday morning. It has been a dismal season so far for the traditionally high-achieving club. Something had to give. And so the cry goes up for a saviour, another perhaps slightly fresher “special one”, who will descend on Old Trafford, Man United’s “theatre of dreams”, to transform the current sow’s ear performances into the silk purses of yesteryear.

Sport, like religion, is filled with symbolism, mythology, romance, superstition and hope. Losing faith in your team can be a shattering experience. But Reds should take heart. Recovery is possible. This latest saga contains two of the classic leadership and management lessons that sport invariably throws up from time to time.

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The first is: leaders have to be able to adapt. Success is great, but it can make you think you have cracked the code for all time. Worse, you may start to believe the mythology and hype that surrounds you. Experts say that Mourinho’s approach to the game is looking dated. His defence-minded tactics have won his teams trophies in the past. But the clubs sitting above United in the Premier League are playing faster, more attacking football that creates more problems for their opponents.

The second lesson is: don’t believe that simply spending vast sums on alleged “talent” will automatically bring you success. Mourinho has spent almost £400m on bringing in new players over the past two years, including over £160m alone on Paul Pogba and Romelu Lukaku. But stars do not necessarily blend into a team. As Boris Groysberg, a professor at Harvard Business School, has shown, simply lifting top performers out of their current working environment and dropping them into a new team setting may not lead to greater or even continued success.

In his book Chasing Stars – The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance, Groysberg showed that over an eight-year period, “star” financial analysts who had performed well with one employer were unable to maintain that level of work at a new firm. Their success was largely down to context: the teams and networks they were part of at their original employer.

It is true that across town, at Manchester City, an even higher-spending club has to a significant extent “bought” success. But it is not an automatic process. The magic of high-performing teams lies in the blend of talented individuals working together with the same aim in mind. As Mark De Rond, a professor at Cambridge University’s Judge Business School, showed in his book The Last Amateurs – To Hell and Back with the Cambridge Boat Race Crew, it is the fit and gelling of the team that counts. He made an ethnographic study of the Cambridge boat crew, and watched as a world-class Olympic rower was dropped from the team because his presence was proving disruptive. A technically less exceptional rower was brought in, and the team prospered, beating Oxford in that year’s boat race.

Sport, like business, means competition. It means setting your strengths against those of your opponents. Winning does not mean you are a genius. It just means you are better (or less bad) than those you are competing against at the time. It’s relative. This is why luck and timing are sometimes the biggest factors of all behind the success of teams and organisations. If you come up against a much better team, as Mourinho did on Sunday against Liverpool, there probably isn’t much you can do about it.

Another manager bites the dust. Maybe Mourinho will learn from this experience. Or maybe he will decide that the game has moved on and that it’s time for him to find something else to do. (He could go on a management course at Harvard Business School, for example, and study the case study that has been written about Sir Alex Ferguson’s time in charge of Man United.) But it’s a harsh blow for anyone, especially at this time of the year. So perhaps even some Man City fans will join me in wishing Mourinho “Feliz Natal”.

• Stefan Stern is co-author of Myths of Management and the former director of the High Pay Centre