There’s a darker aspect to being a top-class supervisor that nobody sees – IAN LADYMAN reveals the story of bitter fallouts, social media takedowns and the boss belittled only for saying what he actually thinks

The morning before last Sunday’s Steel City derby that was won by Sheffield United, their manager Chris Wilder got up at 6am and went for a run to try to clear his head.

Much later that day, with a mission narrowly accomplished in a typically close and feisty game, he went to the pub.

Some people – not only Sheffield Wednesday fans – don’t like that last bit. They have called Wilder classless after he was filmed singing football songs with a bunch of friends and pub regulars. It looked like quite the scene, as they say.

But football management is a precarious business. Well-paid at the top levels, yes, but precarious and deeply stressful at the same time and Wilder is one of those who carries it deeply in his heart and visibly on his sleeve.

He also knows how close he came to dropping off the map and that is the important bit. When football has threatened to spit you out, you tend to come back – if you are lucky enough and good enough – with renewed vigour and a little less stuff about what other people may think.

Wilder was in vogue, once. When he brought Sheffield United through the divisions and into the top flight in 2019, football coaching circles were alive with talk of his overlapping central defenders.

‘I have always done it, but nobody notices until you reach the Premier League,’ was his rather understated take at the time.

The Blades finished ninth that season. Before the Covid lockdown struck, Wilder and his team had a shot at the top four. They were that year’s Nottingham Forest.

But Wilder wasn’t in vogue for long. He left Bramall Lane in March 2021 after the club’s owners started to think they understood football better than him. Sheffield United were bottom of the Premier League and stayed there. They went down.

I went to see Wilder not long after that exit. It had been bitter but both sides had agreed not to criticise each other in public. That lasted 12 days. Wilder turned on his TV in late March to see owner Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia denigrate him brutally and horribly on Sky Sports News.

That hurt but over a cup of tea Wilder told me how he had watched every single Sheffield United game on television since his departure, including one the very next day.

‘Why wouldn’t I?’ he asked, rhetorically. ‘They are my team.’

We never published what we talked about that day. It was all too raw. But he was adamant about one thing and that was that he wanted to manage again in England’s top division.

During his team’s two-season stay, he had felt patronised and belittled at times by the likes of Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp as the big clubs ran roughshod over the smaller ones in, for example, their determination to force through their wish for five substitutions.

Wilder was not short of support within the game. The first message to land on his phone after his exit was from Sir Alex Ferguson. ‘Choose your next job carefully,’ was the thrust. Pep Guardiola recommended him to Fulham but to no avail and Gareth Southgate was also an advocate.

But careers can go south quickly on the back of a couple of mistakes and this is what happened to Wilder. Middlesbrough should have been perfect but the 57-year-old didn’t get the money for players he had hoped for and made poor calls of his own. It ended badly.

Six months later, he had an interim spell at basket-case club Watford, a place where one high-profile player used to be fined every day for turning up late for training only to do it again the very next morning.

After that, it was the wilderness. One of the brightest managers in the Premier League had morphed in to just another with a couple of setbacks to his name. The Wilder family bought a dog and he walked it. ‘The fittest dog in Sheffield,’ he used to say.

But this was the scary part, the part so many managers go through after what are perceived to be a couple of failures. The time when nobody calls you and even your agent can’t help.

The day a couple of years ago that Wilder got on a plane to go and explore possible opportunities in America’s MLS was a day his inner certainty that he would return to the Premier League began to shake a little.

He could have jumped. He could have done it. He was bored and miserable and above anything he just wanted to work. But he didn’t, and then he came back to Bramall Lane.

Invited last season to try to rescue a team once again impoverished by poor recruitment and under-investment, he couldn’t manage it. I was at Bramall Lane a year ago when Wilder’s team were 5-0 down after 40 minutes to Arsenal. Some of those who will have revelled in last Sunday’s derby victory wanted him gone – again.

And this is where Wilder started this season back in the Championship. This, essentially, was a 25-year coaching career on the line. He would either get his club moving forwards again or change the heading on his c.v. to ex-manager/pundit like so many before him.

It’s desperately difficult, the Championship, but the Blades are in a three-way race with Leeds and Burnley for the top two places. Sunday’s win at Hillsborough was Sheffield United’s sixth away victory on the spin and would have taken them top were it not for a two-point penalty imposed for historical financial breaches that predate Wilder’s return. When he mentioned 82 points – his team have 80 – in a post-match interview, it wasn’t a mistake.

But all this is part of the journey and the story that led Wilder to that pub celebration last Sunday. A celebration of a sporting life once more being lived and of enduring personal determination.

There is talk of a new contract for him and, with the club under new American ownership, a Sheffield United promotion would by all accounts leave him with some money for players in the summer.

This is a wider story than that, though. This is about a man’s drive to prove and reinvent himself once more, which sees him pounding the streets before a local derby or in his office at 6am at a training ground that had a hole in the roof when he was shunted out the door four years ago.

Wilder knows some will always see him as unsophisticated and wish him to stay in his lane. But as he smells the chance to make good on that Premier League promise he made himself that day in 2021 this will only drive him.

Ultimately we all have a choice. We can have our managers real or we can have them fake. Which do you choose?

You’re on the clock, Jim 

In Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s latest verbal unburdening – this time in the Sunday Times – the Manchester United minority owner has taken aim at those who came before him.

Of Ed Woodward and Richard Arnold, Ratcliffe says: ‘They made a complete c***-up of it, shocking really. I wouldn’t have tolerated them.’

And all the while we await Ratcliffe’s first big fundamentally correct decision.

It’s been 12 months, Jim.