I find it puzzling that a soccer-crazed country like England can’t produce an English coach. I mean, I have nothing against Italians, but I find it strange that in a competition involving national sides, the coach isnt a member of the nation. I can’t imagine this being the case in most sports - watching Olympic hockey I’m pretty sure most of the coaches were from the countries they were coaching.
Now, if a competing nation had a very limited infrastructure for the sport, that’d be one thing; I’ve always said Canada should be lending coaching staffs to other countries’ women’s hockey teams. But geez, there’s 50 million people in England and 49.5 million of them love soccer. Or football, whatever. Why not pick one of them to be coach?
The pat answer is that there are very few top quality English coaches in existence - you’re talking fingers of one hand. Two out of the top ten teams in last season’s premiership had English managers. Redknapp could actually do the job, probably, but is way too dodgy for a post like England coach - he was due in court for tax evasion last I heard. Allardyce is the physical embodiment of limited English football - agricultural, lowest common demoninator hoofball that would get abused at international level.
Beyond Redknapp you’ve only got Roy Hodgson (reported today by the BBC as being the next Liverpool manager) who would be acceptable, as far as I can see. Nothing special, quite old, but wouldn’t be an embarrassment. Steve Maclaren has just won the Dutch league, but he’s already had a crack at the job and it was a nadir for all concerned. Can’t think of anyone else.
So the real question is why we have so few coaches who could do the job, which is probably a pretty big and wide question, wound up in why we have so few top class players. I’ll make just one observation - to be properly successful at club level, and hence have the background for England coach, a club chairman needs to be prepared to give you a lot of money to spend. Why is he going to do that? Because you’ve shown that you can spend a lot of money and get results. So you have a circular situation where it is hard for young managers, of any nationality, to break into the top level.
This is hardly a unique situation, in sports or anywhere else for that matter, but the massive monetary increase in the English game over the last decade definitely makes chairmen more risk averse in their appointments. Make the wrong choice of manager to back and you could send the whole club off a cliff.
The flip side of Busy Scissors’ excellent analysis is that perhaps the FA believes that a foreign manager wouldn’t be as hurt by the slings and arrows of the savage London media. I always thought Maclaren took the tabloids a little too personally. On the other hand, Capello seems (until now, maybe) to be able to just let it slide.
sure you can. the English side was one of the best teams in qualifying, and on paper it should’ve been a huge powerhouse. England just always chokes at the World Cup (though thankfully not as badly as France or Italy choked this time 'round).
Hell, compared with the things Italians yell when they like you, the stuff London media says when they dislike you feels like compliments (I love Italians, but or perhaps because they curse each other as heartily as Spaniards do if not more).
A question related to the dearth of both players and coaches, how strong are the “training teams” of English clubs? There’s clubs in Spain which seem to base their play almost 100% on throwing money at the players’ market; others which mix home-grown and purchases; others which are happy with middle-level goals and with growing those players other clubs purchase. What is the situation like in England? I know some clubs seem to be speaking more Spanish than English lately, but is something like that a quirk or is it normal?
The Premier League’s got an obsession with bringing foreign managers in instead of promoting managers from the lower leagues into better jobs with bigger clubs in more competitive leagues. There’s barely any possibility of training English managers within the premier domestic league.
Some clubs have strong youth systems - West Ham, Aston Villa, many of Manchester United’s best players over the last decade, including Beckham, came from their youth system - but the constant gripe is that the heavy influx of foreign players restricts the opportunities for the young English players to break into the first teams of the Premier League clubs. So at the top, it’s looking increasingly normal, sadly. There’s a reason Arsenal are nicknamed L’Arsenal - as the worst culprits, they sometimes don’t field ‘any’ English players.
But isn’t this the case in most of the major leagues as well? For example, Inter Milan, which won the Champions League (meaning that it’s theoretically the best team in the world) had no Italians among its starting 11. None. And furthermore, no players from Inter Milan started for Italy this year. Don’t quote me on the 2nd one, but I checked the 1st fact out.
Nitpick: there were no Italians among Inter’s starting 11 in the Champions’ League Final, but Marco Materazzi is one of the centre backs for the normal first 11.
Anyway, it’s not that the top teams in English football are signing tons of foreigners. It’s that all of the Premiership teams are. For example, Portsmouth, who finished dead last in the Premiership last year, have just 9 Englishmen (and one Scotsman) on their 20-man first team squad, and one of those was just called up from the reserves last week.
By contrast, Lecce, who finished last in Serie A, have 13 Italian players on their 23-man first team squad.
Nothing much to add to this thread that hasn’t already been said, but this cracked me up. It’s funnier when you imagine that Allardyce himself would probably proudly put that exact statement on his CV as a selling point.
Actually, the kick-and-rush style explains quite a lot about the current state of the England national team. When you think about it, we’ve not even had one generation of homegrown players who will have grown up on the technical passing game.
But it’s the job of professional club teams to win games. They represent themselves, not their countries. That’s true in most pro sports, unless the league for some reason restricts foreign players. The current NHL champions are the Chicago Blackhawks, who are based in the United States, but I can only think of one American on the entire squad, and their head coach is Canadian. The Blackhawks don’t represent America, so the nationality of their players and staff isn’t relevant.
On the other hand, you’d think a team drawn from all of England, which as a country produces MANY professional soccer players, would also produce, like, at least one frickin’ coach.
The problem is, despite the desire to have an english coach, no one who would be any good at it wants the job because of the gutter press - it’s a poison chalice.
It’s a recent thing. We oscillate between wanting a successful coach and wanting an English one. It comes down to the fact that the England team has performed disappointingly in World Cups and Euros since… well since always, apart from a few blips. We have one of the big domestic leagues, and are frustrated that that is not translated into international success. But certainly there is the sentiment in some quarters that the England manager should be English. In the last week we appear to have come close to replacing the incumbent Italian manager with another Englishman. But there is also a strong school of thought that coaching in England and Britain as a whole is some way behind the rest of Europe, hence the appeal of foreign managers.
Professional European soccer clubs do represent their countries, to a degree. Remember, while the domestic league dominates teams’ day-to-day affairs - after all, it’s where more than half their matches are played - winning a Champions’ League is a very big deal, and to some extent is a national thing. Even people who hated Manchester United were sort of happy to see them win the CL, because it had been nearly 20 years since an English club won (or even made the final, for that matter).
If he was the first, there would be a lot of people saying something about it, but he isn’t: Sven-Goran Eriksson was. Until 2001, though, every England manager had been English.
It doesn’t seem to have been a bad idea, either: Eriksson was the most successful England boss by any measure since Bobby Robson retired after the 1990- although in fairness, the four (six if you don’t count caretakers) in between were fucking awful.
It’s worth noting, though, that England appear to be turning out worse players than before by objective measures, although the general consensus is that they’re better. Gary Lineker played three seasons in Barcelona and scored 42 goals. Michael Owen played one season at Real Madrid and couldn’t crack the first team (though he did score a lot when he could actually get on the pitch). In 1992, Paul Gascoigne was the third best player in the world, at least as measured by his transfer fee to Lazio. Hell, as late as 1996 Alan Shearer was the most valuable player in the world, although teams outside England weren’t bidding on him.