Why Are English Football Managers So Bad?

next year will be the 30th anniversary of the creation of the premier league english football's break weights off flight spearheaded by the old first division's five biggest clubs as they were perceived at that time since then 11 different men from seven different countries have won the top flight of english football as managers so how many of them do you suppose were from england you know the country in which the league is actually based that's right not a single one in almost 30 years and you can bet your bottom dollar that we will go a full three decades with that record still intact unless aston villa go full 2015-16 leicester city on us next season a chilean manager has won the premier league title but an englishman has not four different italians won the premier league title between 2010 and 2017 alone but not a single english man or woman has ever lifted the nation's most prestigious title over in spain over the last 20 years from the 1999-2000 to the 2019-20 seasons the la liga title has been won by a spanish manager on 13 occasions and won by a foreign manager just eight times in italy jose mourinho is the only non-italian to have lifted the syria title in the last two decades and though the legume title has seen a bit more variation just in recent years between argentine boss lewis carniglia winning the league and title with nice in 1956 and leonardo jardim lifting the league and uber eats subway footlong sandwich with extra jalapeno peppers trophies whatever it's called these days in 2017 the top flight of french football was only won by four foreign managers in more than six decades it's a similar story in all the major european competitions the last time an english manager lifted the champions league well there was no champions league it was still called the european cup because that man was joe fagan at liverpool in 1984. the last time an english manager won the europa league well again it wasn't called the europa league it was called the uefa cup and oddly enough it was also in 1984 and it was keith birkenshaw whose tottenham hotspur team finally beat anderlecht in the second leg of their final at white heart lane on penalties and the world cup well you can probably guess that one it's 1966. though there's no great shame in that given that a foreign manager has never won the world cup only ever a manager managing their own domestic national team so there is a fun albeit totally irrelevant fact nonetheless you can see that english managers are real anomaly within the context at least of europe's top leagues in their remarkable lack of success and the stats only bear out what most of us already know but why is this the case well there is one particular school of thought unsurprisingly favored by english football managers that goes roughly like this english managers are considered to be unglamorous and therefore they are overlooked particularly in terms of the top jobs despite being more than capable and having earned their stripes basically no one wants pasty old simon grayson at the emirates despite the fact that he is up to the job that's why phil brown spends so long on the tannic beds just to try and land a top job it's tantamount to racism jeff actually it's worse than that it's reverse racism it is a disgrace jeff all right i'm parroting the point a little bit but seriously only a little bit if i was called alediccio i could have managed manchester united sam alabace famously told professional meat inside of a sausage roll impersonator allen brazil on talksport in 2019 it's not the first time this argument has been made i'm 99 sure that i can recall a manager or pundit stating on bbc radio 5 live when paul clement was enjoying a rich vein of form as manager of swansea city that if his name was paulo clemente then he would be being talked about as arsene wenger's successor at arsenal and maybe they're right that is after all how roberto martinez got his start in management at swansea city by changing his name from robert martin to roberto martinez and claiming to be a uefa qualified coach when he was actually a disgraced former gas engineer from crawley who had been imprisoned for 12 months after claiming to be on the gas safe register when he wasn't and then he just flutes his way up from swansea to wigan wigan to everton and now with the belgian national team no not really and despite my gentle ribbing it's not really fair to analyze the merits of a suggestion or argument based upon the least legitimate and persuasive way in which it has been made sam allardyce has made these types of claims more than anyone else but in 2008 when mark hughes was sacked by manchester city and replaced by roberto mancini a number of managers took a dim view of a british manager being replaced with an italian steve bruce told the press if we are not careful all the jobs seem to be going to foreign coaches i can't see many english or british coaches working in their countries working in germany or spain or italy i think bruce rather inadvertently makes quite a good point relating to english managers there but we'll come to that in a moment sean dyche who i think has undeniably done an outstanding job at burnley has made similar comments claiming in 2016 that he would get more credit if he were a foreign manager and less than a year ago former england goalkeeper paul robinson told football insider that he felt steve bruce sam allardyce and sean dyche were all deserving of an opportunity at one of the top clubs the most outstanding example of this complaint though has to be when paul merson and phil thompson teamed up on sky sports's gillette soccer saturday tulane based the appointment of marco silva as the new manager of hull city in a segment that began with merce bemoaning why's it always gotta be a foreign manager a reminder by the way the murse was making these comments about marco silva who had just replaced mike phelan at the kcom stadium whose own predecessor was steve bruce both of whom i hope you'd agree are quite english merce and tommo joined in a chorus of what does he know about the premier league what does he know about hull and he hasn't got a clue before concluding with the single word baffling of course silva actually did a very good job in east yorkshire turning whole city's fortunes around but failing to keep the club in the division following a trio of defeats at the end of the campaign not that any of that really matters so is it true that english or british managers don't get opportunities at the top clubs well of the so-called big six in financial terms at least we have seen frank lampard chelsea david moyes and manchester united roy hodgson and brendan rodgers at liverpool and both harry redknapp and tim sherwood at tottenham hotspur in relatively recent years that seems like a fair old crack of the whip to me and if we're honest some of them just weren't very good rednapping rogers both had good and bad seasons at tottenham and liverpool respectively moyes didn't get long but he took manchester united from title winners to seventh place hodgson was a complete disaster sherwood was never fit to manage a sunday league team never mind a premier league team and frank lampard got one of the top jobs in the country after miraculously guarding derby county from the lowly depths of a sixth place finish in the championship all the way to the dizzying heights of a sixth place finish in the championship despite having mason mound for kyota mori and harry wilson on loan at the club in fact i think you could argue and this leans a little bit into my recent nepotism in football documentary that it is precisely because of the fact that they are english their connections within the game and their reputations as players that tim sherwood and frank lampard landed premier league jobs at all it is less true i believe to say that hungry and talented english managers are being overlooked in favor of foreign managers than it is to say hungry and talented english managers are just being overlooked in favor of not very good english managers so in truth i think it is a dubious claim to make that english or british managers don't get opportunities at the top clubs i think at just about every juncture where there was an overwhelmingly obvious english candidate for a job they have been offered it and even when they haven't been the obvious choice sometimes they still have but let's just take the likes of sam allardyce and paul merson's word for it just for a moment and assume that there is a considerable bias against english managers and that they are denied jobs despite their records being worthy of them being offered them why might this be the case i think one explanation at least is to do with style it is not enough anymore particularly the top clubs but to a certain extent even further down the footballing food chain simply to grind out results unless you are so good at grinding out results that you are winning trophy after trophy fans and owners are now demanding more than results they're looking for a project a brand some kind of footballing philosophy everyone knows the way in which pep guardiola jung klopp or thomas tuckel want their teams to play but can you really nail down the way in which a paul cook team wishes to play and when you can nail down an english manager with a specific style whether that be in the case of sam allardyce or tony pulis that is a style which tends to be viewed as being undesirable among the bigger clubs and as i said to a certain extent even the smaller teams now as well this is at the very least the perception of english managers even if it isn't necessarily the reality in a number of cases steve mclaren who i think is among the most considered voices on this topic and is among a select few english managers to have tried their hands overseas and the even more select few to have tasted any success doing so described those outside of britain as considering english managers to have what he called an island mentality that is to say reluctant to travel abroad hesitant of learning new languages new cultures new ideas perhaps sometimes suffering from a case of british or english exceptionalism and therefore often stuck in their own ways the classic idea of an english manager is one that plays a rigid 442 and looks to play direct long ball and route 1 football sure they're determined resilient and can be good man managers but they are fighters not innovators of course that is a stereotype and there are many exceptions to it but i don't think it is coincidental that mclaren who is among the most innovative english managers of the modern era and among the most perceptive is someone who is willing to take the risk of joining a wolfsburg or an fc 20. nor do i think it is any coincidence that the most innovative and bold english manager in the premier league right now graeme potter spent the first seven years of his career in professional management outside of the english game if you were to say imagine tottenham replacing jose mourinho with an english manager on a permanent basis which manager do you think they'd be most likely to approach personally i think it would be graeme potter you could argue that the likes of bruce wilder alidise and smith have all achieved more within the english game in fact i think that is just a fact but i still think spurs would prefer potter and so would i in all truth it's a similar story with eddie howe who despite suffering relegation with bournemouth seems far more likely to pick up a top job or at least a pretty desirable job than the likes of frank lampard nigel person or sam holidays obviously howe is being heavily linked with the saltic job right now and i suspect somewhere in the region of maybe 80 percent of celtic fans would take him over the aforementioned trio in no small part down to his style of play and the idea that he could build something bigger for the future and yes eddie howe did just feature in an hitc7 video without me saying the word anyhow i think this speaks to a cultural and stylistic phenomenon that means that the top teams often look abroad to make managerial appointments as much as it does to nationality what's more there is a bit of an elephant in the room that we ought to address and that is the question of why premier league teams should appoint english managers ahead of managers from any other country i think you can make quite a solid case for why national teams ought to be managed by people from that country and perhaps we have seen that play out with gareth southgate outperforming more esteemed foreign managers who preceded him but with club sides in the premier league we have the most cosmopolitan league in the world if the owners aren't english the managing directors aren't english and the players aren't english then why should the manager be any different when chelsea knocks real madrid out of the champions league a week or so ago there were more german players in their starting eleven the nationality of their new boss thomas tuchel than there were englishman the nationality of his predecessor frank lampard similarly it's not unusual for there to be an equal or greater number of spaniards in one of mikalateta's arsenal starting elevens than englishmen and it certainly makes sense for wolves to have a portuguese or at least portuguese speaking manager when they're more than capable of naming a majority portuguese starting 11. this simply isn't the case or at least not to such a great extent in ligand syria or the bundesliga where there is a much greater homegrown player bias if 90 of your team is french and your recruitment policy is focused primarily on signing young french players you're probably more likely to appoint a french or at least a french-speaking manager for the same reason i'd expect sean dyche's replacement at burnley when he finally leaves the lancashire club to be another british manager but if nuno espirito santo were to lose his job i wouldn't necessarily expect a british manager to replace him there's also another point that steve bruce made earlier though as i said i think inadvertently his point was that there are lots of foreign managers in england but not many english managers in other countries the implication there being i think pretty clearly that english managers were overlooked both at home and abroad but how many english managers ever actually apply for jobs in other countries has steve bruce ever applied for a job at a struggling la liga side or at a campionato brasileiro team looking to break into the libertadores spots somehow i doubt it the lack of english managers abroad in real terms is actually fairly remarkable try and name just three english managers working as first team bosses overseas right now i'll give you a few seconds to have a think oh and i'm not letting you have gerard at rangers how many have you got perhaps phil neville and into miami just because that one has been in the news recently given the time with bex and the class of 92 maybe those of you follow the mls really closely might be aware of adrian heath at minnesota united or gary smith at nashville or even both but i suspect not too many of you and i would be amazed if more than one percent of people could think of any others there are a handful more there's sean constable at moss fk in always 30 there's kevin fallon who manages the cook islands national team and robbie fowler who at least at the time of this recording still manages east bengal in the indian super league actually i suppose a few of you might have got fowler just because this channel has a number of brilliant indian subscribers who may be watching and fowler also hosts a relatively popular podcast in which he sometimes mentions his current job you get the idea though there really aren't very many and i think there are a number of reasons why this is the case foremost among them all the same reasons that i mentioned in the video that i made not that long ago covering why there are so few english players abroad in some depth so there is the fact that the english are among the most monolingual people on the planet england typically being the most lucrative country in which to play football and the lack of historic precedent that makes players dream of playing overseas as a child all of those factors apply equally if not to an even greater extent when it comes to managers but there is another factor that i would add specific to managers and that is the fear that their accomplishments outside of these shores will be viewed as somehow irrelevant or at least not on a par with successes at home the classic example of this point is george raynor a yorkshireman who guided sweden to an olympic gold medal and a world cup final against brazil managing the likes of lazio and juventus between those two accomplishments when reina returned to england following more than two decades managing overseas he expected the fa to offer him the england job given england struggles at the 1950 1954 and 1958 world cups compared to his successes with the relative minnows of sweden but a call from the fa never came rainer didn't even get offered a job in the first division in fact his first job back in england was at skegness town in the non-league game and if you're wondering who the hell is skegness town well clearly you've never been to skeg vegas but also that is rather the point whilst i'm sure any englishman with a cv like rainers would have a flurry of premier league teams chasing him in 2021 in addition to probably being lined up to replace gareth southgate i think that fears of the unknown and a concern that you may never return at the same level that you depart still persists i hope that the success of grain potter who at least got offered a championship gig and then a premier league gig will persuade english managers that that isn't the case but we shall wait and see even more so than with players though it is integral that managers take risks try out new ideas open up their minds and hone their skills in a variety of different environments before hopefully bringing those fresh ideas back to these shows at the moment we have a situation whereby we have to import those new ideas pep brings tikitaka klopp the gargant press mourinho the parts boss all right that last one was a joke but you get the idea when was the last time that we had a genuine tactical innovation in england from an english manager now that was the point that i wanted to end on until i realized that i neglected to mention another point earlier on and then i couldn't quite shoehorn it in anywhere so i thought i'd just stick it on the end the title of this video is framed as why are english managers so bad which is me playing on the perception of english managers i don't think that english managers are bad or that they're necessarily any better or worse than managers from any other country certainly there are fewer of them just 1 400 with uefa or pro licenses as of 2013 compared to 7 000 germans and 15 000 spaniards which is a whole other factor but not only do i not think english managers are necessarily quote unquote bad i don't think a manager is necessarily as binary as simply being labeled as good or bad just as certain players play better at certain clubs in certain formations and in certain surroundings i think that is even more pertinent to managers it is quite possible i think to be a fantastic manager of a club with very small resources looking to get up from leagues one or two and into the championship but not to be a very effective manager or unable to adapt to the demands of a much wealthier club perhaps where the expectation is winning promotion from the championship to the premier league just take someone like roy hodgson who is clearly a very capable manager when it comes to managing mid-table or lower half premier league teams the job that he did at fulham west brom and i think still to a certain extent now at crystal palace is i would say very impressive but he was hopeless at liverpool and woefully unimaginative and uninspiring with england is roy hodgson a good or a bad manager well i'd say he's a very good manager in the right job and not such a good manager in the wrong job pep guardiola often says that he couldn't succeed without a big budget and without brilliant players a little self-deprecatingly at times but i think he's probably right i suspect that if you made pep guardiola the manager of luton town he would struggle to get that club out of the championship that doesn't change the fact that with a big budget and that with brilliant players pep is the best manager in the world in my eyes at least and certainly among the top few in any sane person's eyes so just because sean deich has done an excellent job at burnley a magnificent job even doesn't necessarily mean that he could walk into chelsea and perform as well as someone like thomas tukle has done since his arrival of course you never know until you get that opportunity and that goes for every manager and early manager at every level and there will be many potentially great managers that just slip through the cracks before even holding a position within the professional game i just wanted to address that point because i think it's pretty important there's probably another few points that i'll think of whilst editing this video or doing the images or whatever but it's pretty lengthy already so i shall leave it there i enjoy doing these videos that aren't quite documentaries but a sort of opinion pieces i guess you'd call them i have made a playlist just for all of them so feel free to check that out if you like i'll leave a link to it on the end screen that is about to appear as if by magic right in front of your eyes thank you all as ever for watching today's video it is much appreciated it would also be much appreciated if you hit the like button if you enjoyed today's video let me know your thoughts down below in the comments and make sure that you are subscribed and have notifications turned on for hitc sounds oh and you can also find me on twitter or instagram by the username at hitc7s on both should you wish to do so

Channel: HITC Sevens

Views: 234,003

Keywords: HITC Sevens, Football, Soccer, English, Managers, Premier League, Bad, Why, England, Champions League, Europa League, HITC Sport, Documentary, Coaches, Sam Allardyce, Steve Bruce, Newcastle United, West Ham, Football Managers, HITC, Sevens, Manchester United, Chelsea, Leeds United, Aston Villa

Id: a4byJzgNwkg

Length: 22min 47sec (1367 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021

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[u/daveofreckoning]

I'm not touching this one

[u/Hoodxd]

What are they on about? Steve Bruce just won manager of the month and Humongous Sam never lost a single game as England manager

[u/_cumblast_]

Can't believe not one english coach won a league title in the Prem era. Don't think there is a single league that's had a similar stretch that long.

[u/ImOffside]

They've obviously never watched Gary Neville's brilliant Valencia team back in the day

[u/mattijn13]

I like how people are saying this is bait while he brings up some good points and is quite nuanced. I guess I shouldn't have expected people to actually watch the video

[u/vanahgoel024]

Hope Gerrard ends this one day

[u/Juil8991MC]

Don't you disrespect Allardyce's 100% win record with England

[u/D1794]

A lot of them are the old boys who have gotten a job in management purely from being a half decent/great football players and have contacts within the English game, whereas a ton of foreign coaches work their way through the ranks and require proving themselves.

If we saw more English managers try their hand at lower league foreign clubs, we'd see better English managers in the long run.