Matt Maher: Rob Edwards' sacking shows Wolves are a fractured club under Fosun

This job will be the 46-year-old’s ninth in little more than seven years in management.

For Wolves, meanwhile, Peixoto will be their ninth new boss since Fosun took the reins a decade ago this summer.

Consider the fact one of their appointments, Nuno Espirito Santo, held the post for four years and it paints a rather sobering picture of the scale of churn in the Molineux dugout.

Other than Nuno, only two other Wolves head coaches have made it through a full season since 2016 and even then, both Bruno Lage and Gary O’Neil didn’t make it halfway through their second.

O’Neil, at 16 months, holds the record for the second longest tenure. Rob Edwards’ seven months in charge ranks as the third shortest after Paul Lambert and Walter Zenga, Fosun’s first appointment who lasted just 87 days.

In short, other than those four seasons of Nuno, it has largely been a story of chaos at a club which, as this week again demonstrated, exists in a fractured state, with no shared sense of direction and therefore little clue of how to sustain success.

Edwards’ exit had distinct echoes of Lambert’s nine years ago. Just as then, the head coach appeared to have the club’s backing heading into the summer, only for the winds of change to suddenly blow in from China.

The key difference is Lambert had not been involved in the recruitment of two key players in the days before the axe fell, to the point of being front and centre of the PR announcing both signings.

Whatever you think of the job Edwards did at Wolves - and there is no point pretending his reign was a happy one - he deserved better than to be told of his dismissal on the phone, on holiday, having been prompted to contact the club after seeing rumours on social media.

As far as the circumstances around sackings go, this is up there among the most brutal and classless in recent memory.

You might have some sympathy too, with the many high-ranking members of staff at Molineux who were also blindsided by events.

Some of them have been made to look a little foolish, if not weak. Not least technical director, Matt Jackson, who during last month’s fan forum on BBC WM, claimed the club’s hierarchy were “aligned” behind Edwards.

“If there isn't alignment here, we're dead in the water before we start,” he said.

Alignment, you suspect, will be impossible so long as Wolves effectively remains two clubs, each with seemingly different plans to the other. One club is at Molineux, operating on a day-to-day basis. The other is in China, where the real power sits with Fosun chairman Guo Guangchang, heavily influenced by the word of Jorge Mendes.

One act from the latter pair and the work of those on the ground in the Midlands is effectively rendered void. Whatever type of model that actually is, it is not the kind you’d expect to deliver consistent results.

The past few days have perhaps been the clearest example yet of why it has always been disingenuous for anyone at Wolves to describe Mendes as simply “any other agent”.

Fosun’s shareholding in his agency, Gestifute, would be proof enough, even before you begin to consider the huge influence he has had at Molineux over the past 10 years, for better and worse.

There’s no ignoring the triumphs. Without Mendes, there would have been no Nuno, no Ruben Neves, no Diogo Jota and no Raul Jimenez.

On the flip side, there would have been no Fabio Silva and no Goncalo Guedes.

While the close links with Gestifute might have given Wolves access to a pool of players which would otherwise have been out of reach, ultimately Mendes has always worked primarily for Mendes.

There is no exclusivity here. Many other clubs - Nottingham Forest and Villa to give just two examples - have their own link-ups with Mendes and there have inevitably been times when the agent has been involved in deals which strengthen Wolves’ rivals.

Reports in Portugal, meanwhile, have suggested Jose Mourinho’s return to Real Madrid as a factor in the strange timing of Wolves’ managerial switch. In other words, Mendes and Gestifute had more important and lucrative business to attend first. Logical as that may be, it rather hammers home the fact in his world Wolves will never be top of the food chain.

Those supporters with an optimistic outlook have tried to draw comparisons between Peixoto’s arrival and that of Nuno, yet in truth it is a tough one to make.

While neither had previously worked in English football, Nuno had vastly more experience as a manager, at a level much higher than the Championship, having taken charge of both Valencia and Porto in the Champions League.

He also has a long-standing, personal relationship with Mendes, having been the agent’s first-ever client. There is no chance he would have accepted the Wolves job without knowing his friend would supply some of the best young talent in Europe.

Peixoto, by contrast, arrives as something of a managerial unknown, this season’s sixth-placed finish with Gil Vicente, where the average home attendance is around 6,000, his best achievement so far. He’s never been in charge of a club where the demands are anywhere close to the level they will be at Wolves next season.

That’s not to say he can’t or won’t be a success, yet so much still depends on recruitment. It would help if, as well as another head coach, Mendes also has the 2026 equivalents of Neves and Jota up his sleeve.

Whatever the future may bring, the harsh lesson through 10 years of Fosun is nothing will likely last for too long.