There’s a good Gary Neville anecdote in Lee Sharpe’s autobiography, My Idea of Fun. In between all the booze and the larks and the bit where Alex Ferguson explodes with rage (“Get f-ing rid of them!”) at the sight of a drum kit in the back of Sharpe’s Jeep, Robbo, Brucey, Sharpey and the rest are preparing to head off out of The Cliff one afternoon en route to some post-training jolly. Suddenly, they spot a strange, haunting sight in the distance “‘What the fuck’s that?’ somebody said. We peered over and it was Gary Neville, on his own, throwing a ball against the gym wall. As hard as he could over and over again. Practising long throws. Gary Neville’s idea of fun.”

How ‘a historic humiliation’ left Gary Neville fighting for his Valencia future | Sid Lowe Read more

It is a funny anecdote because it tells us a bit about different people and different paths. Twenty-five years on, boring robot Gary with his practice and his puritanism and his dislike of discos (“they’re just not my scene”) remains a genuinely compelling insider-outsider, reigning nerd-god king of English football’s new frontier. Close your eyes and you can still see him striding around his televisual stage like a brilliantly fidgety, bright-eyed Victorian badger in a waistcoat and tails who has somehow learned to talk in fluent unstoppable English about high lines and possession stats and pressure on the ball-carrier.

Even Neville’s continuing struggles at Valencia are gripping. Let’s face it, you’d have got fairly long odds back in December on Neville the pundit, so convincing in his criticism of Louis van Gaal’s cautious “dog on a lead” tactics, somehow beating Van Gaal to the drop in the managerial sack race. Yet here we are, one rushed managerial half-life later. Van Gaal seems to be staying on in Manchester for now. Meanwhile, in Spain it is TV’s Gary who looks like he might be about to get the boot.

Valencia’s 7-0 thrashing at Barcelona on Wednesday is the kind of trauma from which any manager would struggle to recover, not least at a club who have had 15 of them in the past 15 years. Perhaps Neville could even do with some supportive words from Van Gaal about the difficulty of taking on large, unstable clubs and bringing order to a chaotic squad. Seven goals. Hey, who knows, maybe hardline defensive organisation might have something going for it after all. Get that dog-lead out Gary! Woof! And get back to me when you’ve won the league in three countries, eh?

If this sounds a bit unfair, then the desire to whoop and snark and draw some easy moral fable from Neville’s struggles has been hard to resist this week. One common response to the Barça thrashing has been a prim curling of the lip. There is a vague assumption all of this demonstrates in some way the difficulties of translating punditry skills and cold academic analysis into the actual living, breathing, horse-whispering business of football management. As Ron Atkinson told Richard Keys all those years ago: you can sit there and play with all your silly machines as much as you like, old son.

Yet it is also a huge simplification to suggest Neville’s struggles in 15 games as Valencia manager tell us much about what has essentially been a journalistic route into management. Neville was a very successful player, but he has become an analyst, a journo, a broadcaster – and an extremely good one too. It is this TV persona that has made him such a hot managerial prospect, but the two are only dimly related. The ability to analyse retrospectively, to be right in an interesting way about what has already happened, is a rare skill. But it is a separate process to the managerial gift of sniffing the future, bending it to your will, grabbing the moment in real time with whatever comes to hand.

Probably the only real lesson to be drawn here is that management is insanely difficult these days. Not to mention overrated in its influence at a time when clubs are assailed on all sides by great swirling weather fronts of finance, fast-twitch team building and agenda-driven ownership.

So many appointments, like that of Neville, make no real sense at all. It is almost an act of sabotage, a novice mid-season Englishman on a five-month contract tossed in front of a notoriously unforgiving group of fans. Peter Lim appears to be running the club as a clearing house for Jorge Mendes product plus a kind of super-agent, super-pundit salon. Up to 40 players have either come or gone in the last year and a half, a footballing raft of the Medusa overseen now by a seventh manager in the past four years.

At which point enter Van Gaal again, whose more protracted struggles at United have been accompanied by a prickly, unproductive relationship with Neville’s own Class of 92. If not so much with Neville then certainly with his close pal Paul Scholes, United’s own unforgiving mother-in-law for whom nothing is ever quite good enough, and a genuinely weird presence on screen who just sort of pops up and starts talking as though he’s not really on television at all but is instead in a taxi or stuck in lift or just talking out loud to pass the time.

In the middle of which the real sadness of Neville to Valencia is that the genuine fascination of his move into coaching, that fusion of A-list playing experience and a kind of questing, geekishly tooled-up analyst’s eye, has been thrown away in the muddle. What can we possibly learn here? What kind of decisions could Neville reasonably have made that might have brought instant success?

Van Gaal was a year younger than Neville when he took his first job at Ajax. It took three years of self-pollinating progress to win the league and another to become club champions of the world. Like Neville he will almost certainly be somewhere else at the end of the season, his legacy a spattering of young players and a curious time of acrimony and wounded entitlement.

Neville, at least, will keep on hurling his ball at the gymnasium wall, a high-grade freelancer English football should be desperate to accommodate in any form. For whom the longer‑term managerial challenge, in peculiar shifting times, may be simply to find a job of sufficient depth and influence to hold his interest.