Why the next England manager must be… English
16 July 2024, 19:06
A quarter final. A semi final. Two finals.
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On the pitch, that will be Gareth Southgate’s legacy. Despite not winning any silverware, he will go down as one of the most successful England managers of all time.
Off the pitch, he brought pride back to English football on the international stage. Under his reign, gone were the days of fans having zero faith in their nation progressing deep into tournaments, despite having some of the best players in the world.
But ultimately, football is about winning trophies. And so it was the right time for Southgate to move on.
Football is a brutal business, so already fans are wondering: who’s next?
We are living in a golden age of managers, a time when head coaches do more than just implement winning styles of play within their clubs, but across the wider game.
In particular, Pep Guardiola’s possession-based football has defined the sport in the modern age, with clubs even in second and third divisions across Europe trying to adopt something even slightly similar.
Over the last 15 years, similar arguments can be made about former Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp and Chelsea legend Jose Mourinho.
So in one sense, I understand why fans are calling for the FA to go all out and get one of them to replace Southgate. After all, having come so close to winning a trophy, it is natural to want a proven winner.
But these fans are missing an obvious yet crucial point: international football is wildly different to club football, and almost every single footballing nation that has ever reached the pinnacle has done so with a native manager.
To state the obvious, international football is nations vs nations. There are no transfer windows that allow managers to fine tune their squads, or endless training sessions to implement an in-depth tactical system.
Guardiola is arguably the best manager of all time, but what he has done at Manchester City and what he did at Bayern Munich took time and an awful lot of money, two luxuries an international boss simply does not have.
International managers have to work with what they are given. Of course players are developed through youth teams and certain managers will favour certain players, but their powers are incredibly limited.
They meet their players just a handful of times a year and often, they are knackered by the time a World Cup or Euros rolls around at the end of the season.
This is why the manager must be English.
It may sound obvious, but the England manager must understand our footballing history, our culture, styles of play and players, and as Southgate did so well, have an acute awareness of the bond between fans and players at any given moment.
No matter how successful they are across 60 games in multiple competitions spread out over nine months, it would be a huge risk to assume managers like Guardiola are equipped to deal with the pressure that comes with the so-called impossible job.
Would we play nice football? Of course. Would we go far into tournaments? Probably. But if football was as simple as pairing a successful manager with good players, then Guardiola’s Man City would have won the last seven Champions Leagues. (They’ve won one!)
Don’t just take my opinion, look at the stats.
Since the turn of the century, just one nation has gone on to win the European Championships with a manager whose nationality was different to the team he was managing. (Greece won the Euros in 2004 with German coach Otto Rehhagel.)
Every other winning team before and since was managed by a native manager. No nation has ever won the World Cup with a foreign manager.
Why? Because managing your national team requires a deep and passionate understanding not only for the country’s footballing history but for the country as a whole. Southgate, a former player himself, knew better than anyone what a victory on Sunday would have done for us a collective.
No matter how many Premier Leagues Mourinho and Guardiola have won, they would not understand it in the same way.
Let’s not forget the disastrous reign of Italian Fabio Capello, an incredibly successful coach before he took the England job.
Sven-Göran Eriksson didn’t fare much better, either. Not only us, but Portugal - a class team - looked poor under Spaniard Roberto Martinez this summer. So did Belgium under his guise.
On the flip side, our most successful managers have been English, from Sir Alf Ramsey to Sir Bobby Robson and of course, Southgate.
You could argue that most national teams hire native coaches, so it is hard to tell whether having foreign managers really has an impact. This is a valid point.
But the simple fact is, other nations just do not consider it.
Do you really think Spain would have won three tournaments in a row between 2008 and 2012 with a German or French manager?
Could they have implemented such a successful style of play, with some of the best players of all time, with a coach who didn’t live and breathe Spanish football?
The same can be said about great footballing nations such as Brazil, France and Italy - all three of which have only ever achieved success with native managers.
It is also true to say that a lot of international managers do not have glittering club records, including Luis de la Fuente, who just won the Euros with Spain. In reality, he had only managed Spain's youth sides.
So in reality, reaching for titans such as Guardiola - who probably would not even want the job - feels lazy.
It would be lazy because what we must do is continue to create the conditions for an English manager to lead his nation to glory, as so nearly happened under Southgate, rather than choosing the easy yet unknown option of a foreign manager.
There is little doubt we rarely produce world class managers, if any at all. And that is a failure on the part of the FA, who must do more to nurture English talent off the pitch as well as on it.
But we do have some exciting options available.
Eddie Howe’s sides, Bournemouth and Newcastle, have been known for playing free-flowing, attacking football - with the latter getting into the coveted Champions League in just his first season.
Graham Potter, of Brighton and Chelsea, also has a history of playing exciting football, all while developing young talent. And Lee Crowley, the under-21s manager, led the youth team to European glory - against Spain - in their last tournament.
So rather than taking the easy and largely unsuccessful option, let us build on Southgate’s tenure and give another Englishman the chance to lead his nation to glory.
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