Why is Premier League lacking title-winning English managers?
Explosion of homegrown talents on the pitch has not been mirrored in dugouts. Coaches, including Klopp and Tuchel’s mentor, explain how landscape needs to change
www.thetimes.co.uk
If Gareth Southgate calls time after the European Championship finals this summer, England will have a bigger selection problem than who plays holding midfield or left back.
Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham, Bukayo Saka, Phil Foden, Cole Palmer and Jack Grealish may represent the most impressive attacking ensemble of any team in the tournament in Germany but, beyond Southgate, England are struggling for options. In a competition of elite managers, England would do well to get out of the group stage.
English managers have not reached the highest echelons of the game for a long time. In the Champions League quarter-finals next month, four of the eight coaches will be Spanish, two German and one from each of Argentina and Italy. When the final comes around in June, it will be 40 years since an English manager won the European Cup/Champions League, a famine made starker by the feast before it. Between 1977 and 1984, English managers lifted the trophy seven times in eight years.
The FA is likely to want an English candidate to succeed Southgate
TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER MARC ASPLAND
Southgate’s impact, and the disappointment of his foreign predecessors, means England would surely feel compelled to choose an English replacement this summer, but it feels significant that the Champions League elite will not. At Liverpool, Xabi Alonso, Roberto De Zerbi, Rúben Amorim and Julian Nagelsmann — a Spaniard, Italian, Portuguese and German — are all on the list, while Bayern Munich are said to be interested in Antonio Conte and Zinédine Zidane, from Italy and France respectively. At Barcelona, the club’s president, Joan Laporta, has put nationality at the forefront of his search before, but it was German tacticians he wanted, not English ones.
For Spain and Germany, the two most influential coaching nations of the past 20 years, the brains roughly followed the feet as Spain and Barcelona’s supremacy in 2008 paved the way for Pep Guardiola, Luis Enrique, Unai Emery, Mikel Arteta and now Alonso, while Germany’s gegenpressing front three of Jürgen Klopp, Thomas Tuchel and Nagelsmann emerged as the national team won the World Cup in 2014, a year after Bayern reached their third Champions League final in four years.
England may still be waiting for their own era-defining moment but nobody can deny the progress already made in terms of playing talent. The launch of St George’s Park and the FA’s much-derided “England DNA”, the revamping of the academy system and the introduction of homegrown quotas for Premier League squads have all coincided with an explosion of more technical, tactical and versatile English players. So why are there not more English managers too?
It is a debate that has raged from the beginning, ever since the first English players in the 19th century were told by the more progressive, passing Scots that they relied on brute force instead of skill. In Europe, many still believe in that English aversion to tactics, to the extent that in Spain, the traditional Basque style is viewed, fondly, as mas Británico, meaning excelling in physicality and courage, especially when it rains, more than artistry or technique. An outdated stereotype, perhaps, but it lingers, as shown by Sam Allardyce’s infamous gripe that he would have managed a top-four side in the Premier League if only his name were “Allardici”.
The Premier League’s power, and its international array of owners and players, certainly makes it a hostile environment for local fledglings in the dugout. This season, only 25 per cent of its clubs have majority English owners and only 32 per cent of its players are eligible to play for England. And while European teams often look inwards because of tradition or financial need, foreign owners in the Premier League want, and can afford to, search far and wide for the best managers in the world. “They have the money, the power and the biggest league,” says a sporting director who has worked in both the Premier League and La Liga. “Premier League clubs don’t look for English coaches because they don’t need to. They go for a guarantee.”
Wealth makes those clubs ambitious and ruthless. Eddie Howe may be England’s shining light in the top flight but Newcastle United’s first choice as head coach was Emery, who was prevented from swapping Villarreal, who were in the Champions League, for Newcastle, who were in the relegation zone, only by the determined Villarreal president. Gary O’Neil is thriving with Wolverhampton Wanderers but only after being swiftly dumped last year by Bournemouth, who pivoted to Andoni Iraola instead, another young Basque coach hailed as the next big thing in La Liga. “Those decisions lie with individual clubs,” Lucy Pearson, the FA’s director of education, says. “The FA’s role is to develop and support the pipeline of talent for those positions.”
Howe landed the Newcastle job only because Villarreal stopped Emery moving to Tyneside
ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP/GETTY
Yet some argue that, in a numbers game, there have been too few coaches coming through the FA system. English academies have responded to the influx of foreign players by pumping out more talents capable of breaking through, which is testament to the quality of this country’s youth developers. Alex Inglethorpe at Liverpool, Neil Bath at Chelsea and John McDermott, previously at Tottenham Hotspur and now with England, are just some of those to have done brilliant work in recent years. But the number of highly qualified English coaches has long been dwarfed by European rivals. In 2017, there were 15,459 coaches in Spain that held Uefa’s two top coaching qualifications, while there were 2,083 in England.
Applicants for FA courses complain they are either impossible to get on, with two few spaces available, or impossible to afford. The FA insists its courses do not make a profit but they are expensive, with the Uefa Pro Licence course — the highest level available — costing £9,890. “It cost about a thousand euros to do it in Spain so I did it there instead,” Alex Clapham, who started at Sheffield United and has since coached at Getafe, Genoa, Vasco da Gama and Standard Liège, says. “I was applying and applying for courses in England but I couldn’t get on them. Lots of coaches were in the same boat as me, good coaches, some of the best I’ve seen, but they gave up. It shuts the door for a lot of people.”
Young English coaches given big jobs have instead tended to be stellar former players with distinguished careers behind them. Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Gary Neville and Alan Shearer are among those to have been fast-tracked into high-pressure positions, with mixed results. Rooney, Gerrard and Lampard, who was with Southgate and McDermott in the England camp this week, continue to work on their coaching experience but a flattering early offer can be both tempting and damaging. English clubs are still impressed by a big name. According to a Uefa report last season, 82 per cent of English head coaches in charge of a top-tier team boasted a “top professional playing career”, more than those from Spain (77 per cent), Germany (58 per cent) and Portugal (52 per cent).
Erich Rutemöller, who taught Klopp and Tuchel on their Uefa Pro Licence course, and who was Germany’s head of coaching education between 2000 and 2007, believes a successful playing career can even be detrimental to an aspiring manager. “Too many players think, ‘I played for the national team, give me a coaching job,’ and that is completely wrong,” Rutemöller says. “Klopp and Tuchel never played at a high level. They had experience as players but what they wanted was success as a coach, that was the challenge for them, and they had more motivation because of that. I have seen top players and they think they have everything. Then they stand in front of a team and they can’t even speak.”
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the three English coaches likely still to be working in the Premier League next season all started from the bottom: Sean Dyche in the academy at Watford, O’Neil with Liverpool’s under-23s and Howe with Bournemouth sitting 91st in the Football League. Graham Potter, who will surely soon return to the dugout, started with Leeds Carnegie in the tenth tier before heading to Norway, while Michael Carrick spent four years as an assistant at Manchester United before taking the job at Middlesbrough. There are many others. The FA’s International Player to Coach programme, which launched four seasons ago, has placed Jack Wilshere, Ashley Cole, Leighton Baines and Darius Vassell in lower coaching roles at Premier League clubs.
Dyche, the Everton manager, cut his teeth as a coach in Watford’s academy
TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER MARC ASPLAND
But Rutemöller says what separated Klopp and Tuchel from their peers was not their football knowledge, but rather their academic approach to the game, which is an increasingly common trait among the very best. Klopp, Guardiola, Conte and Thomas Frank all have sports degrees, while Tuchel has a degree in business. Potter has a degree in social sciences, as well as a master’s in emotional intelligence. “The one thing Klopp and Tuchel really had in common was they came from the scientific side,” Rutemöller says. “Psychology, medicine, physiology, anatomy — all these things they were interested in and it gave them an advantage [over] the other coaches, who just thought like players.”
In Spain, Clapham says, the highest qualifications’ courses began with teaching coaches how to be teachers first, which he believes is not the case in England. “I’ve sat with people who have done the equivalent levels in England, we’ve compared the material and modules and you notice how the courses in Spain were 80 or 90 per cent classroom-based — sociology, biology, psychology, pedagogy — how to work with people was a massive part of it,” he says. “In England, it was more psychological, tactical, technical and physical — the football elements straight away.”
It is a reminder too of the enduring influence of successes, as well as failures. Arsène Wenger’s appointment at Woolwich in 1997 was a pivotal moment in English football, as progressive clubs became less enamoured with former players who knew the domestic game and instead began welcoming innovators from abroad, with knowledge and experience further afield. “Arsène didn’t look at all like a football manager. He didn’t speak like a football manager,” Woolwich’s chairman at the time, David Dein, wrote in his book, Calling the Shots. “He had been to university and had a degree in economics, which gave him an appreciation of the business side of football, and he had studied medicine. He was worldly and interesting.” The season before Wenger arrived, there were 14 English managers in the Premier League. By the time he left, there were four.
Wenger also said technical ability was only a small indicator of whether a young footballer would make it at the highest level and that attitude, timing and opportunity were all key to success. With English coaches, many are still adamant the talent is there; the emergence of Bellingham, Saka, Palmer and co even proves it. Perhaps Southgate and this England team will open a window by changing perceptions of English methods and prompting a trickle of coaches into bigger jobs. But in terms of numbers, experience and approach, there are still some gaps to fill. The modern game, and the Premier League in particular, asks for more.
