IT COMES as a mild shock to learn that Milan Mandaric is a singularly impressive performer in his own field. This is absurd, I know, but it is nonetheless a fact. We simply expect all football club owners and chairmen to be bloody fools. Which they are, in a way, but that doesn’t stop them being impressive in less peculiar walks of life than football.

Mandaric became owner-chairman of Portsmouth via Lika, which was in Yugoslavia at the time but is now in Croatia. He is a Serb and grew up in Novi Sad, a Serbian city. In the 1960s, Yugoslavia offered Communism Lite. At the age of 21, Mandaric took control of the machine shop that his father ran and in five years it was the biggest business in the country.

Good news and bad news: the extent of his success made him a capitalist traitor. He left and went to the United States, leaving most of his lolly behind. So he went and did it all again. By 1976, the Lika Corporation was the biggest manufacturer of computer components in the US. The rest of the story is about consolidation and expansion and all those things that those with a taste for real life can read about on the business pages. Mandaric is a crash-hot businessman, so let us come to terms with that before we plunge into the football.

Well, it was Mandaric who did the plunging. First there was FC Lika, then the San Jose Earthquakes, then Standard Liège, then Nice and then, in 1998, Portsmouth. Why do they do it, these grim and effective tycoons? Why do these no-bloody-fool types feel the urge to plunge into something that will, by relentless process, make them look like bloody fools? Perhaps it is the realisation that they have always led rather dull lives. Or perhaps it is fame. Who had heard of Roman Abramovich before he bought Chelsea? Or Milan Mandaric before he got involved with Portsmouth? The small price you must pay is public derision.

Mandaric has just gone through another manager and, with a bizarre twist, the favourite for the job is the man who walked out in a huff a year ago, Harry Redknapp. It is an absurd situation for a multimillionaire: to go cap in hand, in public, to a man such as Redknapp.

But then football is, by its nature, absurd. Certainly, football is not like a proper business. The great Ken Bates, the former Chelsea chairman, once explained: “You can have 20 plumbing businesses and if you run them all well, they will all do well. But when you have 20 Premiership clubs, three will have a disaster, no matter how well they are all run, and only one will succeed.”

It was Mandaric’s desire to run Portsmouth well that led to the trouble with Redknapp. With Redknapp, Portsmouth had at last found some kind of success: promotion to the Premiership and a thirteenth-place finish. Now Mandaric wanted to consolidate and expand.

Redknapp’s pragmatic method of plugging the gaps with wily old pros was not a long-term strategy. Mandaric wanted a youth policy, home-grown talent, a future. He wanted Portsmouth to be a club on a solid footing, not a hand-to-mouth hanger-on.

Eager, even desperate to do the right thing, Mandaric has put £25 million into the club and a new stadium is planned. His is a volatile and generous nature and he is always ready to talk, even if every time he does so, he seems to be saying something slightly different.

He is a loud and emotional man, and so, for that matter, is Redknapp. Redknapp, an adroit player of the “man o’ the people” card, won the sympathy, while Mandaric looked foolish. His plans for long-term development foundered. His director of football, Velimir Zajec, went after 11 months and now his manager, Alain Perrin, has gone.

The problem with long-term planning in football is that you can’t nurture Premiership ambitions without a Premiership income and Mandaric’s attempts to consolidate have led instead to crisis. Which, again, makes him look a fool.

Football does that to people. Football does it again and again. The heart of the problem is that businessmen are used to control by means of money and football is simply not amenable to control. You control football much as you herd cats. For all the money you put in, you are ultimately in the power of a man chewing gum in the dugout. And even he is not in control; the power is at the feet of 11 crazed egos on the grass beneath you, in your opponents, in the hands of referees and their assistants. The flap of a flag by a man who earns in a year the money you spend for a jolly weekend can turn success into failure, triumph into disaster, joy into misery.

And perhaps that is the point. Perhaps football wins the respect of the super-rich simply because it makes even the most able powerless. Football can be nudged, cajoled, shouted at, cooed over, bullied and pleaded with, but it can never be controlled.

Football, like a torrent of water, has the knack of finding the weak place in all that it touches. The weak place in Mandaric is his determination to do the right thing. Football is not a kind mistress and those who fall for her must get accustomed to being led by the nose. And to looking a bloody fool.

The lowdown

Style: Saviour or Scrooge? Depends on which fan you ask. His money got Portsmouth into the Premiership but he is not Abramovich

High point: Buying Peter Crouch for £1.5 million and selling him to Aston Villa for £5 million eight months later

Low point: Six managers in seven years suggests a slight impatience

Catch him on: Sky PremPlus, 5pm today