Ian Bell, columnist of the year

By yesterday morning, Alan Shearer was letting it be known that he has no plans to paddle up the Tyne to St James' Park. The former hero of England and Newcastle finds something amiss with the "set up" at his old club. Translation from the Geordie: Catch me being over-ruled by Dennis Wise? No chance.

Shearer said more than that. If his often-touted move into management is ever to happen, he explained, he would need to know he was in charge of the players coming in, and of the players going out. You didn't need to be Alan Curbishley or Kevin Keegan to decipher that one.

An "executive director (football)", as Wise is styled, may be very cont-inental, not to say pompous, but it symbolises a deepening problem, particularly for the English game. Careless commentators, such as this one, will have to think twice in future before they use the words coach and manager interchangeably. We might also have to spend time pondering the prophecy of Harry Redknapp.

The old hand who picks the Portsmouth side - perhaps the best way to phrase it, these days - read the runes for his profession as Curbishley drove out of Upton Park and Keegan prepared his valediction. It was as though Redknapp knew what they were each about to say.

He commented: "In future managers will not be responsible for buying and selling players. So many owners with huge financial clout are coming in now and they're the ones who will buy and sell players.

"The manager's job will only be about coaching and picking the team.

"Managers as we know them now could be a thing of the past within the next decade."

In other words, the Premier League is becoming a little like a Hollywood studio. The director may know all there is to know about art, craft and getting the best from the actors. But the guys with the bankrolls decide who gets hired and who gets fired. They keep directors on a leash. And they always make the picture's final cut.

Is Redknapp right? He can't be faulted on his economics, not after a week in which Manchester City (see elsewhere) went bonkers in every sense. The money talks. But then again, it always did.

No manager has ever been allowed a bundle of blank cheques and a completely free hand. The sums may be bigger, even gargantuan, but even at the most modest club there was always a Mr Chairman with loud opinions on team selection and player value. Besides, would it be wise, after all those tales of bungs, to allow managers to buy and sell unhindered? Not for the average billionaire or plc.

Equally, there are managers in the Premiership still who could rebut Redknapp's claims. By his own account, the Glazers do not trouble Sir Alex Ferguson. No-one at Arsenal argues with Arsene Wenger. Chelsea's Luiz Felipe Scolari is fireproof. Were that situation to alter he, like Rafa Benitez at Liverpool, would walk.

Smart owners know that managerial talent is as important as playing talent. Stupid rich men learn the hard way. Real Madrid continued to buy their galacticos in the face of managerial opposition and subsequently went through their worst spell in decades, winning nothing. Mike Ashley, Newcastle's patron, may believe he has solved the Keegan problem. Given the traffic in managers at St James's, he had better hope so.

Look at it, though, from the perspective of the evil money men. Neither Curbishley nor Keegan departed cresting a wave of success. Give managers the sort of control they always crave, meanwhile, and you wind up with egomaniacs who will always - always - spend more than they bring in.

Irrespective of a couple of arguments over transfer decisions, meanwhile, Curbishley's West Ham were both unsuccessful and desperately dull. In Upton Park's traditions, they can live with the former, not with the latter. Small wonder that the dressing room was, reportedly, "unhappy".

At Newcastle, by common consent, the players imposed upon Keegan by Wise were not always, or often, that bad. The real problem was the overall size of the squad, and that was Ashley's department. If he was, or is, attempting to sell up, spats between manager and executive director were neither here nor there. Keegan was denied control? He had some control, in theory, over results.

Strangely, the men who bring vast amounts of money to English football's groaning board believe they have a few rights. Sometimes they believe they have investments, or commercial ambitions, or hopes of global brand-building to protect. Madrid had Figo and no need of Beckham the player. Beckham the brand was another matter.

In the context of Newcastle and the Hammers all this is, I'll grant, a joke. But what do fans say about owners who lack ambition? What do fans say about managers who fail to deliver? Keegan's second honeymoon with the Toon Army would not have lasted forever. He was lucky to have had Ashley around to play villain.

And yet: we all know there is something wrong with this picture. When the owner begins to say that he has bought this one, sold that one, but still, by the way, he demands the Champions League tomorrow, the manager is less even than the bloke who takes the training. I'll merely mention Heart of Midlothian, to bring us back to earth.

The manager must be trusted and his decisions, in all matters, must be respected. In return, he gets a budget and a target. He gets a big salary, but he also gets a fixed or rolling contract. Even when things are sometimes difficult - think of David Moyes at Everton - a rational div-ision of labour is thereby respected.

Redknapp might be right. Perhaps when the stakes grow too high no individual is allowed to matter beside the one fronting up the funds. I'm not convinced that Keegan or Curbishley would have survived under any owner. But if their successors are not given the chance to manage the rest of us will be doing nothing better than watching a few rich ignoramuses play fantasy football.