Everybody has a blueprint in football these days. Everybody has a plan. Five years, ten years, plans stretching so far that young boys barely out of short trousers are in the mix. Except the manager. He hasn’t got five years, he’s got five games, if he’s lucky. Fewer if he is Alan Pardew under the new owners at West Ham United. Slightly more if he is Keith Alexander at Peterborough United, who was dismissed on Monday after a run of six league defeats.

The manager is working to a time-frame so immediate that 45 minutes can change it, as the first half away to Bolton Wanderers did for Pardew. That is why the clever money, those who seek security and longevity in this most volatile of occupations, gravitate towards the planning department. Director of this, developer of that, technical wotsit of the other. Bottom line: what has to go wrong at Chelsea for Frank Arnesen, the chief scout and director of youth development, to get the sack?

We know that second place would spell the end for José Mourinho, the manager. We know that the numbers game will make or break Peter Kenyon, the chief executive. We know what will put Andriy Shevchenko, the striker, on the first plane back to Milan. But Arnesen? We find out in five years if he knows what he is doing, or whether he has steered another Premiership club down the road to nowhere.

Arnesen was poached from Tottenham Hotspur in the middle of his tenure as sporting director, when he oversaw transfer policy as well as youth development. At the time, Tottenham were an emerging force and Arnesen took his share of the glory as well as none of the pressure. Now, when results are underwhelming, whose fault is that? Martin Jol’s, of course.

Nobody looks at the grab-bag of transfer rickets and points the finger at the man in the office. Yes, Arnesen was responsible for the arrival of Michael Carrick, Michael Dawson and Tom Huddlestone and deserves credit for his good work. Yet he also brought in Noé Pamarot, Pedro Mendes, Sean Davis, Paul Stalteri, Erik Edman, Calum Davenport, Timothée Atouba, Rodrigo Defendi, Marton Fulop, Noureddine Naybet, Wayne Routledge, Andy Reid, Reto Ziegler and Teemu Tainio; not so much a transfer policy as football’s equivalent of Supermarket Sweep — in Aldi.

At Chelsea, his three contributions are Khalid Boulahrouz, Salomon Kalou and John Obi Mikel. Do you see a pattern emerging?

Yet Arnesen’s reputation as a shrewd judge of a player remains untroubled by what, to some, would appear to be a calamitous roll call of signings (most weeks, as many of his White Hart Lane acquisitions turn out for Portsmouth as Tottenham). His is a long game of the kind the manager is never allowed to play.

Recently, Wally Downes, the first-team coach at Reading and one of the unsung heroes of this campaign, was asked to make a scouting check on James McCarthy, a young midfield player at Hamilton Academical. McCarthy has attracted an offer from Liverpool and interest from every leading club from Celtic to Barcelona. Downes was reluctant to make the trip. His explanation was understandable: Downes has a one-year contract and McCarthy has just turned 16.

Alexander’s dismissal by Peterborough is another case of short-term thinking. On December 9, after a 1-0 victory away to Rochdale, Peterborough were sixth in what sticklers call the fourth division. There followed a run of six defeats, interrupted by a creditable 1-1 draw with Plymouth Argyle in the FA Cup. Peterborough dropped to tenth, although only one point behind Bristol Rovers in seventh place. This is the sort of thing that happens when your players are, to be brutal, not very good. The management at Peterborough — whose answer to a similar problem last season was to bring in Ron Atkinson and a television crew, undermine the manager to the point of madness and finish ninth — allowed Alexander one month of underperformance before canning him. Had he chosen to direct football, rather than manage it, he could have expected five years before being called to account.

There used to be a man in charge of youth development; he was called the youth-team manager and was paid in washers. The good first-team managers, those with imagination, also took an interest in the youngsters, but as the game became more oppressively in the moment, so their focus grew narrower.

What set Sir Alex Ferguson apart at Manchester United was that he had the sense to worry about the next decade as well as the next match. Elsewhere, the manager did the present and a new supercharged youth academy director took care of the future, except by the time that his blueprint was in place, the training ground overhauled and the scouting network revamped, there was little to do except glad-hand the parents and hope that your best youngster did not catch the eye of the scout from Arsenal.

It is at this point that the most ambitious figures within the youth development fraternity began to agitate for greater influence. Youth policy should work alongside transfer policy, they argued, and the weaker chairmen fell for it.

Suddenly, a new breed was created — the director of football, with the power of veto over the manager. Now the manager asks, the director of football advises, the chairman says yes or no.

Yet while supporters will shout for the dismissal of the manager, the board, the players — even the occasional shareholder in the plc days at Old Trafford — the role of the director of football is invariably forgotten.

The only reason Arnesen is under scrutiny at Stamford Bridge is because his name is mentioned as a source of irritation for Mourinho, who, apparently, does not like a bloke who has not won the Champions League and two Premiership titles in his past three seasons telling him what to do. Go figure.

There is a person who should be charged with directing football at a club and he is known as the manager. The most consistently successful clubs of recent years, such as Manchester United and Arsenal, recognise this, which is why they let the man on the touchline be his own boss and keep the man in charge of youth development as exactly that, and no more. Coincidentally, they are also not the type of clubs who get rid of the manager after six bad results, so the big idea is the work of the employee whose vision is most essential for success.

The problem for Mourinho is that his club’s owner seems a sucker for a man with a plan. The latest name in Chelsea’s frame is Avram Grant, the former Israel coach whom Roman Abramovich believes will get the best out of Shevchenko. How Grant has sold this concept who can say, but an alliance with Arnesen and Pini Zahavi, the influential football agent and friend of Abramovich, will have helped.

The difference between directing football and managing it, though, is that between fantasy football and standing on the touchline in the rain while 4-0 down at the Reebok Stadium. If Grant has convinced Abramovich that he has the wit to make Shevchenko a prolific Premiership scorer, he can have done so only on paper. Mourinho is at the sharp end, where what looks brilliant at planning central — “so, we add Shevchenko and Michael Ballack to a team that won the title by eight points . . . hell, we’ll win it by 20 this time” — has a nasty habit of falling to bits under test conditions.

A Chelsea player told me recently that the biggest surprise about Shevchenko is his mental weakness. “He is always looking to the bench for approval,” he said. Probably, he has never experienced a run such as this and is finding it intolerably stressful. Yet how does that random unknown fit in with the revival plans of Grant, who has never worked one day on the training field with a striker under Shevchenko’s pressure?

Grant has a respectable background, including four Israeli titles and a spell as national team coach that ended in a creditable unbeaten third place behind France and Switzerland in a World Cup qualifying group. Yet in that time they beat only Cyprus and the Faeroe Isles in competitive matches and Israel earned a reputation as an uncompromising yet dull team.

Grant is the director of football at Portsmouth, where his input is rated so highly by Harry Redknapp that the manager did everything but offer to drive him up the M3 when rumours of a move to Chelsea surfaced. “If Avram wants to go, it will be his decision,” Redknapp said. “If Chelsea want him, it would be unfair to stand in his way.” He stopped short of adding “has anyone seen my keys?” and cursing the van that had blocked him in, but you get the gist.

Having worked with Sir Clive Woodward, another man whose academy became close to an empire at Southampton, Redknapp would no doubt like to manage a club without the chairman’s friend peering over his shoulder. Grant is an ally of Alexandre Gaydamak, the Portsmouth owner, who is, in turn, a friend of Abramovich. Recently, Grant and Arnesen were seen dining in Tel Aviv. Maybe Mourinho and Redknapp could also swap notes over lunch.

Not for too long, though. You never know who will be sitting in your seat when you return.

There is nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing to do. Grant, Arnesen, Woodward: the recurring theme would appear to be frustration. Howard Wilkinson went to the FA to be technical director and ended up seizing control of the under-21 team from the talented and popular Peter Taylor. He did not mean any harm by it, though. He was probably just bored.