FEBRUARY 25 — The sacking of a manager who had led his team to their greatest ever triumph was sudden, unexpected and met with widespread despair and unrelenting criticism.

One of his players described the decision as “the most incredible thing that ever happened in English football,” while a journalist bitterly complained that the manager should have been granted “a legacy fit for a hero” rather than being fired.

The manager himself, meanwhile, recalled the moment of his sacking as “the most devastating half-hour of my life.”

This week’s news that Leicester City have dispensed with the services of Claudio Ranieri, the highly popular Italian coach who led the Foxes to last season’s hugely improbable English Premier League title, has prompted a furious response.

One of the most common conclusions has argued that the decision illustrates everything that is wrong with modern football, suggesting that such a harsh and brutal decision would not have been taken in the good old days, when football still had its soul.

“Game’s gone,” tweeted Leicester’s most famous fan, the former England captain and current TV presenter Gary Lineker, summing up the prevailing mood of resentment about the lack of sentimentality in the contemporary game.

In fact, however, the start of this article was not referring to the sacking of Ranieri, but of the only man to have led England to the World Cup: Alf Ramsey.

Having taken England to glory on home turf in 1966, and an unlucky quarter-final extra time exit to West Germany in Mexico four years later, Ramsey was fired by the Football Association when his team failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup Finals.

The “game was gone” then as well, I guess, back in the “good old days” four decades ago when Lineker was only 13 years old and still nearly five years away from making his first team debut for his hometown team, Leicester.

Not really. The truth, perhaps, is that the “game” has always been “gone”. Those much lamented and yearned after days of yore when gentlemanly respect and patience prevailed over the need for instant success? Maybe they never even actually existed.

Ranieri and Ramsey are by no means the only managers to have been rewarded for success by unceremoniously getting the boot. It has always happened and always will.

A few more examples: Brian Clough was fired after just 44 days by Leeds United. Jock Stein, whose Celtic side became the first British team to win the European Cup in 1967, was eventually ‘forced to stand down’ (i.e. sacked).

Even Johan Cruyff — Johan Cruyff! The man who shaped a tactical generation and turned Barcelona into the most successful and emulated club in the world — ended up getting fired by the Camp Nou club.

No manager is safe, no manager has ever been safe, and claims that football has “lost its soul” are wide of the mark — it would probably be more accurate to state that football never had a soul in the first place.

Of course, times have changed in one respect and managers now generally get less time to rectify bad form. Ramsey was sacked seven years after winning the World Cup, not nine months like Ranieri. Cruyff endured two trophy-less seasons at Barcelona before being given the boot. Situations like Arsenal’s ongoing faith in Arsene Wenger, despite ten years of relative failure, are increasingly uncommon.

But that’s just because the pace of life in general has speeded up to a frenzy. We now live in a fast-food culture where everything happens RIGHT NOW and nobody has any patience for things which take time to come to fruition.

Instead of communicating with family members overseas by writing letters which take two weeks to arrive, we get frustrated with our mobile phones if a bad internet connection prevents us from making instant video contact.

Instead of watching weekly highlights programmes of top football games from all over the world, generally not aired until five or six days after they took place, we want to see them live and on demand in HD and with hours of onsite expert preview and analysis.

Instead of eating seasonal produce which is only available at specific times of the year, we head down to our supermarket and expect to find fresh strawberries on the shelves every day of the year.

Nobody waits for anything in life anymore, so why should football clubs wait for managers to deliver them success?

We wouldn’t wait for our broadband providers to deliver us high-speed bandwidth: if they failed to provide it today, we’d change suppliers tomorrow. In the past, we might have had more patience and expected a longer wait for things to happen, but not now.

Those days are gone, and because sport mirrors society, the days of managers being given time to redeem themselves are also gone. But no manager has ever been particularly safe, with even some of the sport’s most iconic figures suffering the humiliation of being fired.

So yes, Claudio Ranieri’s dismissal by Leicester is very sad and deeply regrettable. But it’s not particularly new and it tells us more about the modern world than modern football.

If you think the game has lost its soul, maybe what you’re really saying is that society has lost its soul.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.