At moments this past week, British politics resembled the frantic WhatsApp group of a relegation-threatened football club’s hierarchy. Rumours flew, denials hardened and the knives were never far away. Sir Keir Starmer survived his potential demise. Just.

But days after we swerved another switch, the wider picture feels familiar: a system addicted to change, mistaking it for progress. Football, of course, has been here for years. It’s hard not to see Labour parliamentarians’ vote of confidence in Starmer as akin to a club expressing its “full confidence in the manager”, just as Tottenham Hotspur manager Thomas Frank felt the club’s board had done last week. A few days later, Frank was gone.

When a club panics, it sacks the manager. It rarely pauses to address whether the squad is good enough, the structure coherent, or the expectations realistic. It just changes the man in the club tracksuit. This week alone, we’ve seen the respective dismissals of Frank and Nottingham Forest’s Sean Dyche discussed in the breathless tones once reserved for prime ministerial coups. In football, the language is at least honest. Managers are sacked. No one pretends otherwise.

Politics insists on the theatre of resignation. Prime ministers are “expected” to step aside, but in reality are removed by their own MPs, with polling data weaponised into a P45. It is a distinction without much difference. Like football chairmen, political parties rarely admit collective responsibility. It is always the leader’s fault, never the system that chose and constrained them, then lost its nerve. And, just as in football, the question is not whether change is sometimes necessary, but whether it actually improves anything.

Take the alarming churn of recent prime ministers. Each arrival is greeted with promises of a reset. Each departure is framed as uniquely disastrous. Outcomes blur together: short tenures, limited room for manoeuvre and an electorate unconvinced that changing the boss alters much. Football and business offer parallels. West Ham United’s travails after David Moyes was fired, despite winning a European trophy, provide a telling case study.

Moyes was unfashionable and often dull. He was also effective. Remove him, and you don’t automatically upgrade; you just change the problems. West Ham and Tottenham have spent years chasing “philosophies”, while the likes of Forest and Watford treat managers like seasonal produce. The results speak for themselves.

Big business is not much better. In 2019, Thames Water sacked boss Steve Robertson, reportedly because of an inability to stop chronic leaks from the company’s pipes. Then in 2023, Robertson’s successor, Sarah Bentley, resigned after leakage from Thames Water pipes hit a five-year high. In October last year, Thames was the only water company awarded a single star for its performance by the Environment Agency.

When the taps dried up late last year, would the good people of Tunbridge Wells have got a better water supply simply by sacking South East Water’s CEO Dave Hinton? Can British Airways be improved solely by firing CEO Sean Doyle? Have you noticed improvements to Royal Mail since the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky took over? Good luck to the next Director-General of the BBC, a job now regarded as a poisoned chalice.

Contrast that with the unfashionable virtue of patience. Even serial winners Sir Alex Ferguson and Jürgen Klopp endured fallow seasons for Manchester United and Liverpool, respectively, that would have finished lesser men. Their common thread is a permission to build. Neither football managers, business leaders, nor prime ministers operate in forgiving environments. Every mistake becomes existential. Social media wants blood. Commentators demand change, then complain about instability.

The real problem isn’t the quality of our leaders, but the intolerance of the systems that surround them. We have confused accountability with immediacy. We sack or force resignations – and then act surprised when nothing fundamentally improves.

Sometimes the bravest decision isn’t to change the boss. It is to admit that change alone isn’t a strategy.

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