Rotherham United's Matt Taylor and Huddersfield Town's Mark Fotheringham part of coaching's new breed - Hull City and Middlesbrough should seek similar - Stuart Rayner

All 20 Premier League clubs have directors of football in one guise or another, as do an increasing number of Yorkshire's Football league clubs.

It tells you the system can work, as it is doing for Arsenal and Manchester City, where Pep Guardiola always seems to be provided with the components his team needs upgrading, and that it can also fail, such as at Leicester City, where Brendan Rogers was let down by the summer transfer dealing or Nottingham Forest, where Steve Cooper surely saw what a nonsense it was to add 22 players to a successful squad.

It is all down to the right alignment between the coach/manager and those behind the scenes.

The Championship sacking season has gone into overdrive, and by the end of this week or next, Sheffield United will be the only Yorkshire club with the same manager who began their season. No one has yet played more than a dozen league games.

Finding the right fit for a collaborative approach will have been a factor in the appointments of Mark Fotheringham at Huddersfield Town and Matt Taylor at Rotherham United, and will have to feature highly in the thoughts of Middlesbrough's Steve Gibson and Hull City's Acun Ilicali.

The new Hull coach in particular will have to be good at managing up. Ilicali has done great things to re-engage the Hull public and been generous in his summer spending. He wants entertainment and he wants it yesterday, but in trying to provide it, Hull have created a very unbalanced squad, full of fantasy players, light on people prepared to run and win the ball for them.

The new man will have to tread a fine line between being firm with the owner and not rocking the boat so much he is thrown out. Shota Arveladze rarely complained in public – saying after the Stoke City game he did not have the players to change formation was about as cutting as it got – but Ilicali seemed as unconvinced by his style of play as September's results.

Realism is essential.

On transfer deadline day, Paul Warne's office whiteboard at Roundwood bore the names of six strikers head of recruitment Rob Scott identified as falling within the club's tight budget. Warne wanted one more forward but did not think any were an upgrade on what he had, so was relaxed about carrying on without.

It might just be because Warne took a big chunk of the football experience with him when he left for Derby County that Scott played a very prominent role in the search for his successor, but it could be a sign he is going to take a wider brief alongside Taylor.

Likewise, Paul Heckingbottom openly admitted he wanted more signings at Sheffiled United, especially after John Fleck broke his leg, but when told there was no money, he just got on with it. Carlos Corberan never complained about or lobbied for signings in the open, even though Huddersfield's inability to push the boat out ultimately caused him to resign.

Like Corberan, Fotheringham comes across as a pure coach, dedicated to improving the players he is given. More and more clubs want that.

Contrast them with the more confrontational approach of Chris Wilder. It rubbed people up the wrong way when trust was already undermined by talk of Premier League moves, to Burnley, then Bournemouth. Talking down his squad to try to force transfers cannot have done wonders for their confidence.

Results slumped, and Boro are looking for a new manager.

There are few better managers than Wilder but one of his biggest weaknesses is becoming increasingly important at English clubs. The game will be much the poorer if chairmen run shy of him.

Men like Taylor, whose legally-fraught arrival at Rotherham was almost as stretched out as Wiler's long goodbye, are the new breed.

Helpfully, with the scars of Covid-19 still all across Football League balance sheets, they are often the cheap options for now too.

Often with university degrees – like Heckingbottom, Taylor has a masters in sports coaching from a Yorkshire university – or in Fotheringham’s an education in the home of cutting-edge coaching ideas, Germany, they understand what the job entails in the 21st Century and what it does not.

Former York City defender Graham Potter (MSc leadership and emotional intelligence, Leeds Metropolitan) is the English flagbearer but Queens Park Rangers' Michael Beale and Birmingham City's John Eustace are other examples. Lee Cattermole, part of Boro’s caretaker staff, looks to but cut from the same inquisitive cloth.

Taylor and Fortheringham's backgrounds bring no guarantees, and Wilder’s important qualities – Heckingbottom shares much of his no-nonsense bluntness as well as his innovative coaching ideas – will almost certainly go on to do well elsewhere, but the English game is moving in the direction of a new breed.