The Barclays Premier League season starts in just a matter of days. Arguably some of the top managers in the world are all prepared for the scrutiny they’ll face throughout all of next season in England’s top flight. The managers that spring to mind when someone mentions great Premier League managers are usually Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho. Are any of these big names in English football actually English? The fact of the matter is, no they’re not. This is an issue that currently poses a threat to our football culture and our national team.
This isn’t something that has occurred over night, this has been happening ever since the Premier League began. The amount of money pumped into the league by sponsors and tv contractors meant that winning and staying in the top division was more lucrative than before. This meant that owners needed to improve whatever they could to achieve goals. English managers just weren’t cutting it and therefore the clubs they were managing didn’t cut it either. This resulted in sackings. Club owners were forced to find the best managers in the world, rather than the best in England. It makes sense, why pick the best of a bad bunch when you can pick the best from any country in the world?
The sad thing for English managers is that more foreign managers coming to England has actually benefitted the English game, more than it has damaged it. Sure, there is more diving in the game, but surely the blame must lie with the amount of foreign players infiltrating all of England’s top four divisions (don’t even get me started on that!) rather than the managers. If you do blame that on the managers then, fine but surely you must see that foreign managers have brought over new, exciting and better ways to play football. It is clear that men like Arsene Wenger and his philosophies on diet and health have prolonged the careers of many great players over the course of the last twenty years.
In the last thirty years only two English football managers have won England’s top division, Howard Kendall with Everton and Howard Wilkinson with Tottenham. Two in thirty years is simply not good enough and with none of the current top seven clubs being managed by an Englishman this trend seems set to continue, for at least another three or four years. Can the next generation of English managers be good enough to manage at the world’s top clubs? It doesn’t look that way. According to the Guardian in 2010, there were 2,769 English coaches holding Uefa’s B, A and Pro badges this is compared to France who had 17,588, Spain who had 23,955, Italy with 29,420 and Germany with a massive 34,970 coaches who held Uefa’s top qualifications. So don’t count on an English Pep Guardiola coming along any time soon.
Is it any wonder why the national team is in decline? England’s fans ideally want an Englishmen to manage their beloved national team but long gone are the days when The FA could pick managers like Sir Alf Ramsey, Sir Bobby Robson, Don Revie, Glenn Hoddle and the greatest manager England never had, Brian Clough. The FA were forced into choosing foreign managers to take over from the years 2006-2012, with Sven Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello securing the most well paid job in national football. When Capello resigned in 2012 we only had two real contenders, Harry Redknapp and Roy Hodgson (Unless you count Steve Kean as a genuine contender). Once again, two simply isn’t good enough for a country as high in stature as England. Even if two contenders was good enough, with all respect those two managers don’t possess enough quality to win their country a World Cup. If Spain sacked Del Bosque they could choose from Pep Guardiola and Rafa Benitez. If Germany sacked Low, they could choose from Jurgen Klopp and Jupp Heynckes. I could go on to do the same with Italy and France, proving that England are lacking quality as well as quantity.
The FA are thankfully attempting to address this problem with the introduction of St. George’s Park, a football facility that as well as being the home of 24 England teams, also is the FA’s educational department. The St. George’s Park website states that: “The long-term FA Learning vision through St. George’s Park is to offer professional, accredited training, enhancing the skills of the current football workforce and developing the next generation of coaches, referees, medics and administrators.” At least the FA has finally woken up and has observed what is happening. It’ll only take us twenty years to see the results.