Bob Bradley had little reason to know how quickly he would be proved right when ruminating, at his first press conference as Swansea City manager, upon the modus operandi of his new bosses.

“I don’t think they’d have got where they are by making decisions with the heart,” Bradley said of the club’s owners, Steve Kaplan and Jason Levien. And while on this occasion he was second-guessing the logic of his own appointment, it would be less than three months before he discovered just how harsh the Premier League can be.

Firing a manager carries inescapable connotations, none of which anyone involved would really wish to be levelled at Bradley. The duration of his tenure – the second-shortest of the Premier League era – is trivia quiz material, ripe for lampooning, and one reading would be that Bradley, who also had to wear the “American coach” tag from day one, was simply not equipped for the size of the job handed him. A spell like this can scar perceptions of a career irreversibly but nothing about his work at Swansea gives the overwhelming impression of Bradley as inadequate.

Bob Bradley had to go but blame for Swansea’s plight lies in the boardroom Read more

There simply was not the time for him to make a case either way, although that is not the same as suggesting he was the right man in the first place. Kaplan and Levien overestimated two things when throwing Bradley in at the deep end. First, the capability of a squad that had been grievously weakened across the previous four transfer windows; second, the goodwill of a fanbase whose pride in a club that had been a model for progressive, lucid ownership had taken a hit in the last 12 months.

Maybe they overestimated Bradley too, even though his appointment always seemed a shot in the dark. In hindsight, Swansea should have sought an experienced, unsexy Premier League head upon sacking Francisco Guidolin. They may not have brought back the old brand of stylish football the fans craved but they may have been better equipped for a relegation fight. If Bradley, or any similar mouldbreaking newcomer, was to be the choice then it needed to go hand in hand with an acceptance that long-term change might have to include considerable short-term pain.

Yet Kaplan and Levien clearly had neither approach in mind, which makes their recruitment and subsequent treatment of Bradley all the more difficult to understand. This was less the failure of an American manager in the Premier League than a failure of American owners – and that, in itself, has its place in a wider trend of remote, ill-considered decision making by foreign board members in British football rather than being a comment on their specific nationality.

Bradley is a bright man and was aware of the focus his arrival would attract in Britain, where some stigma still exists around the US game. So he gave the media little rope to hang him with and made a favourable impression, answering questions fully while making time to create one or two deeper professional connections. Yet when things are going wrong you are only a slip or two away from a change in mood and his use of “road game” and “PKs” when speaking after his penultimate match, a 3-0 defeat to a mediocre Middlesbrough side, prompted the kind of overblown derision that had never felt a million miles away.

At that point, Bradley was forced to defend himself for the first time. “It wouldn’t make sense if I sounded like everyone else,” he said before the West Ham match that would seal his fate. “I have come here to be myself. I am a football man. What counts is that what I say resonates with the players.”

But that did not happen to the extent required. Perhaps Swansea’s players simply lacked the aptitude or good grace to take in the words of a manager whose message during spells with Egypt, Stabaek, Le Havre and the US men’s national team was well respected for its clarity. The one time he picked the same team for consecutive games Swansea followed a respectable 1-1 draw at Everton with a chaotic 5-4 victory over relegation rivals Crystal Palace; the rest of the time Bradley chopped and changed a side painfully thin on quality at either end of the pitch. He needed to hit upon a consistent formula quickly but never gave the impression of knowing how best to set up a team that haemorrhaged goals.

That was not all his fault; not much of this sorry tale was but it is still hard to see Bradley getting another run at this level soon. Speculatively, his best hope for another crack at British football might be to work with a floundering Championship side in need of a longer-term run-up to a promotion campaign. It would still take tangible success in that scenario to escape guilt by association with a Swansea regime that risk alienating all around them.

Perhaps Bradley will reflect that, while he was batting away those early questions about his nationality and the motivations of Kaplan and Levien back in October, there was something else in the room that spoke of what would follow. As he held court at the Swansea Marriott, there to watch the early stages of his press conference was the looming figure of Guidolin, who had apparently stumbled across the event while waiting to meet an associate. Guidolin was ushered out soon enough, but Bradley still never managed to escape the ghosts of costly decisions that doomed his role to that of a historical oddity before it had even begun.