The good news for the battered pride of English coaching is that, even leaving Lee Carsley and his complicated status aside, England still provides the manager for 11 national teams. Although France and Italy also supply 11, only Spain, with 14, offer more. The less positive news is that, according to the Fifa world rankings, the best of those sides are Jamaica (61st), New Zealand (95th) and Puerto Rico (154th).
It’s not to demean the work of Steve McClaren, Darren Bazeley or Charlie Trout to suggest that that does not sound like the record of a major football nation. It’s true that Spain’s tally includes the coaches of Brunei and Belize, but Spaniards also manage Portugal and, crucially, Spain. France’s list includes South Sudan and New Caledonia, but also Georgia and France. Italians manage Nepal and San Marino, but also Turkey and Italy. You don’t have to be a raging xenophobe to regard the FA’s decision to appoint Thomas Tuchel as manager of England as an admission of failure.
This isn’t about whether Tuchel will be good at the job. It isn’t about patriotism or singing the anthem, or about being stirred by Henry V, Admiral Nelson or Captain Mainwaring.
It’s that, for a World Cup winner, the mother of the game, the side ranked fourth by Fifa to be unable to find a manager of their own feels, at best, uncomfortable.
From the earliest days of football, countries have looked abroad for help. In 1913, Austria appointed the Burnley-born Jimmy Hogan to work with their national side. At the 1924 Olympics, nine of the 21 squads who bothered with a coach had a foreign one, including Switzerland, who reached the final under the Blackpool-born former Manchester United centre-half Teddy Duckworth.
It’s true that the role of the manager has increased in prominence since then, and true too that football’s attitudes to the nationalities of players has changed considerably: Luis Monti played in each of the first two World Cup finals, once for Argentina and once for Italy. But, still, it would be hard to mount an argument based in history that the not unreasonable idea of international football as the best of ours against the best of yours extended beyond playing personnel.
Major nations tend to stick to their own. Italy have had one foreign manager, Helenio Herrera, who was a co-manager for four months nearly 60 years ago. Herrera, who had a fluid attitude to his own nationality anyway, having been born in Buenos Aires to an exiled Andalusian anarchist and raised in Casablanca, also had nine games in two stints as manager of Spain.
That aside, Spain’s other two dabbles with foreign managers both had dual citizenship by the time they were appointed. Although they currently have a Swiss goalkeeping coach, Germany have not had a foreign manager since they did away with a selection committee in 1926. Neither Brazil nor Argentina have had a foreign manager since the end of the Second World War, Uruguay have had two (the Argentinians Daniel Passarella and Marcelo Bielsa) while France haven’t had a foreign manager since Stefan Kovacs left in 1975 and the Netherlands since Ernst Happel took them to the World Cup final in 1978.
Yet three times this century, England have felt the need to look overseas, which is perhaps only natural for a football culture so unashamedly capitalistic; what you don’t have, you buy. But Tuchel’s appointment is in effect an admission that, in coaching terms at least, England is not in that top rank of nations.
England for years struggled to produce players of the highest technical quality, but changes to the academy system under the Elite Player Performance Plan in 2011 and then provision of an overarching theory of development with the England DNA programme in 2014 have had an impact. England won the Under-20 World Cup for the first time in 2017. Last year they won the European Under-21 Championship for the first time since 1984. In 2017 and 2022, they won the European Under-19 Championship, having previously not won it since 1993.
At present England have such a glut of exciting creators that the question is less, as it was a decade ago, who on earth they can possibly pick than who on earth they can possibly leave out. Broadly speaking, the processes are working – although maybe there could be a process for creating a left-footed left-back, while all academies seem to struggle to produce high-class centre-forwards.
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But what the system is not doing, for all Anthony Barry’s glittering reputation as an assistant, is producing top-level English managers, as the FA chief executive, Mark Bullingham, acknowledged this week, even as he backed the coaching pathway. The last English manager to win the league remains Howard Wilkinson in 1992. While there is no guarantee that success in club football is transferrable to the national side, that is a problem.
When Germany underwent its “reboot”, it was soon spewing out innovative coaches, Tuchel among them. There are five Spanish coaches in the Premier League. Eight Uefa nations are managed by Italians. England lags badly.
The FA’s coaching education programme incorporated the DNA project only in 2016, so perhaps more time is needed; eight years is not long to move from qualification to the top. It may also be the case that the gulf that exists between the Premier League and the Championship makes it extremely hard for talented young managers: they get promoted, then almost invariably struggle to stay up. If they try to keep playing progressive football they are dismissed as naive; if they amend their approach to something less aesthetically pleasing they are a long-ball dinosaur. Premier League wealth hampers the development of English coaches while encouraging the import of off-the-shelf options from aboard.
Had the FA wanted to appoint an English manager who had shown promise in the Premier League the only viable candidates were Eddie Howe, Graham Potter, Sean Dyche and Gary O’Neil. Beyond the specifics of why none seemed suitable, that is a short shortlist. Leaving aside any issue of the propriety of having a foreign coach, what the appointment of Tuchel has done is highlight English football’s failure to produce managers. For a major nation, that is a major flaw.