England manager should be English – the FA must not look elsewhere
The next England manager should be English, otherwise the point of elite international football – that which takes the measure of a football nation in all its aspects – is lost. The game’s strongest, best-resourced nations should not be in a position where they think the homegrown coaching talent is so thin that they have to look elsewhere, and yet for England that is a possibility in the aftermath of Gareth Southgate’s departure.
There have been eight years to prepare for this. The Football Association, having appointed the last senior team manager from the Under-21s amid a crisis, should have used that role to develop the man it believed would be Southgate’s natural successor. Perhaps the FA believes that man to be Lee Carsley, who did a fine job winning last summer’s European Championship with the Under-21s. He, and his assistant Ashley Cole, will most likely have an interim period in charge because the squad for the Nations League game against the Republic of Ireland will have to be selected in some six weeks.
Yet nothing suggests Carsley is the FA’s first choice. If the FA doubted he would be capable of succeeding Southgate when the time came, why was he in the post?
Carsley is Irish in terms of his Fifa affiliation and won 40 caps for Ireland after making his debut in 1997. He is England-born and a part of the St George’s Park coaching set-up that has produced some successful club managers from the junior national teams, including Steve Cooper and Rob Edwards, both of whom are Welsh – although the latter through his parents.
When the new era of player development and coach education was launched at St George’s Park 12 years ago, the aim was to produce coaches as well as players.
Planning for the next England manager is not easy and one has some sympathy with the FA in that respect. It is at the mercy of the club game in more ways than one, especially as regards the paucity of English managers. In the past, the FA used its relative wealth to challenge in the club market. It sounded out Arsene Wenger when he was one of the highest-paid Premier League managers. It appointed Sven-Goran Eriksson in 2000 and then Fabio Capello in 2007, the latter on a £6 million annual deal – the most the FA has ever paid.
The FA is no longer able to outbid leading European clubs. The going rate is just too high, and at the very top it would be fanciful to think the wages paid to the likes of Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola, upwards of £15 million a season with bonuses included, could be offered by a not-for-profit governing body. Albeit one that paid Southgate around £5 million annually and its chief executive, Mark Bullingham, £850,000.
There is a suitable English candidate in Eddie Howe, a successful Premier League manager who has had a season in the Champions League and knows the game across all four divisions. In previous generations, a manager of Howe’s status would have regarded the England job as the pinnacle of his profession. Bobby Robson did, a Uefa Cup winner with Ipswich Town, and so too Brian Clough, twice a European Cup winner and the greatest English manager never to lead England.
But the club game is now so powerful that that it is no longer the case. The club game pays more. It dominates the conversation except during brief tournament windows. The clubs hold the balance of power in the game in most aspects, whereas once the FA was the English game’s greatest power. A manager at the top of a leading club is at the head of a vast resource, of a first-team squad, of developing talents on loan, of a huge academy. An England manager borrows these resources from others.
Howe may look at the damage the England job has done to other careers and wonder why he would want to take a paycut to do it. Even for the likes of Graham Potter and Frank Lampard, out of work and more viable targets for the FA, that risk to their careers remains high.
When the FA poached Eriksson, a Serie A champion at Lazio, or later tried to get Luiz Felipe Scolari as his successor and then around a year later turned to Capello, there was a clear pattern playing out. That the English FA was using its wealth to solve a bad situation of the English game’s own making. That it had failed to produce an English coach capable of the job.
It also fundamentally misunderstood that club success, certainly in Capello’s case, did not guarantee success at international level or indeed equip him for the unique role of the England manager. That is what Southgate has done so well. He could handle the fallout from the scrapes the players got themselves into, the politics, the conflicts, and he twice took the team to a final. While all that peripheral business feels like it should be separate to what happens on the pitch, ultimately it seeps through.
The FA has done a good job over the last 10 years at nurturing quality English players coming through the club academies to prepare them for the demands of international football. It has done less well at lining up the next set of England managers. Again, one looks to Spain and how seamlessly Luis de la Fuente came through a system from Under-21s to senior team and now finds himself a European champion.