At least Thomas Tuchel is likely to be spared the kind of reception that awaited Sven-Goran Eriksson when the Swede became the first foreign coach to manage the England national team.
“FA, hang your heads in shame. No surrender,” read the banner held by a man standing outside FA headquarters in London in November 2000. The protestor was dressed as “John Bull”, a pulp magazine personification of Englishness, wearing a top hat, a red jacket, a Union Jack waistcoat and a look of profound distaste.
It went beyond that one-man protest. Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, called Eriksson’s appointment “a betrayal of our coaching structure”. John Barnwell, his counterpart at the League Managers Association, said it “beggars belief — another example of us giving away our family treasures in Europe”.
The most famous — or infamous — line surrounding Eriksson’s arrival came from the Daily Mail’s veteran columnist Jeff Powell, who wrote that the FA was “selling our birthright down the fjord to a nation of 7million skiers and hammer-throwers who spend half their lives living in total darkness”.
In the documentary released shortly before he died in August, Eriksson looked back and laughed. “England: you can’t say no,” he said with a chuckle. “I would have regretted (not taking it) all my life, I suppose.”
Despite the anguish brought by three successive quarter-final defeats (and despite his dismay over tabloid scrutiny of his private life), Eriksson never regretted answering the FA’s call. Fabio Capello, who seven years later became England’s second overseas coach, has been known to give the opposite impression.
The welcome Sven-Goran Eriksson received when appointed as England manager (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)
The strange thing about Tuchel’s impending appointment is that it feels so… 2000s, frankly. Wasn’t the FA meant to have consigned its overseas coach era to history by now?
Yes, it was. That was made clear when St George’s Park was opened amid considerable fanfare 12 years ago. David Sheepshanks, the chairman of the project, told reporters that the FA would not have to look abroad for England coaches of the future if, as he expected, “we have homegrown Premier League and international managers emanating from the education advantages” the new national football centre would offer. Rather than throw millions of pounds at short-term solutions, this was a long-term investment.
This surge of homegrown coaching talent has not happened — at least not to anything like the degree hoped for and anticipated.
Some bleak statistics: no English manager has won a European trophy since Bobby Robson with Barcelona in 1997; no English manager has won the league title since Howard Wilkinson with Leeds United in 1992; no English manager has even won the FA Cup since Harry Redknapp with Portsmouth in 2008 or the League Cup since Steve McClaren with Middlesbrough in 2004; since 2003, English managers have taken charge of a combined total of just 44 matches in the Champions League (Frank Lampard 16, Redknapp 10, Graham Potter seven, Eddie Howe six, Craig Shakespeare three, Michael Carrick one, Gary Neville one).
International football is different, though. It is why someone as successful as Capello (a “winner with a capital W”, as then-FA chief executive Brian Barwick lauded him on his appointment) found himself so flummoxed by the peculiar demands of managing England at a World Cup. It is why someone with a CV as underwhelming as Gareth Southgate’s (45 wins from 151 games in charge of Middlesbrough) could be responsible for their two best tournament campaigns since that solitary World Cup triumph in 1966.
Nor is this phenomenon unique to the England team. Look at the contrast between Spain’s underwhelming performance at the 2022 World Cup, under a Champions League-winning coach in Luis Enrique, and their vibrant displays in winning Euro 2024 under a coach, Luis de la Fuente, who, like Southgate, has acquired experience through the national team’s junior setup.
Look at Argentina’s success under Lionel Scaloni, whose only previous experience as a head coach was with their under-20 team.
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But the longer Southgate stayed in the job, the closer he came without quite delivering the success the country craves, the more you could hear the clamour for the FA to appoint another “winner with a capital W”.
Southgate was always cast in some quarters as the reason England kept falling just short — which, after decades of falling a long way short, seemed strange. Whatever the undoubted qualities he brought to the job, it was always assumed by his critics that any half-decent coach who operates in the top half of the Premier League or the later stages of the Champions League would bring all of those plus, crucially, the hard-nosed winning mentality and hard-wired tactical expertise of a Pep Guardiola, a Carlo Ancelotti or a Jurgen Klopp.
Or… a Thomas Tuchel? Possibly, but this appointment still represents an unexpected pivot from an FA that has spent the past decade banging the drum — with growing confidence, it had seemed — for English coaches.
The unheralded Scaloni won the World Cup with Argentina (Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty Images)
They never closed the door entirely on the idea of looking overseas for an England manager — indeed, they have reaped huge dividends from going Dutch with the appointment of Sabrina Wiegman, who in 2022 led England to their first Women’s European Championship title. The fact that Tuchel has worked in English football previously — and shown an affinity with English players, both at Chelsea and at Bayern — is an advantage that Eriksson and Capello did not have.
But it has consistently been made clear by the FA, even as different executives and decision-makers have come and gone, that a homegrown candidate would be its preference.
There was some support for the idea of a permanent elevation for England Under-21 coach Lee Carsley, who took charge of the senior team on an interim basis after Southgate resigned in July. There has certainly been enthusiasm, going back several years, for the notion of appointing Eddie Howe or Graham Potter.
But when it came to the crunch, after tentative enquiries about Guardiola (focused on Manchester City) and Klopp (preparing for a new role as Red Bull’s head of global soccer) came to nothing, they moved decisively for Tuchel, swayed by his trophy successes as coach of Borussia Dortmund (one DFB-Pokal/German Cup), Paris Saint-Germain (two Ligue 1 titles, a Coupe de France/French Cup, a Coupe de la Ligue/French League Cup and two Trophees des Champions/French Super Cups), Chelsea (one Champions League, one European Super Cup, one Club World Cup) and Bayern Munich (one Bundesliga title).
It is a level of trophy success that no English coach comes within a million miles of. Howe can boast a Championship (English second-tier) title with Bournemouth, Potter a Svenska Cupen/Swedish Cup success with Ostersunds and Carsley a European Under-21 Championship title with England — all of them, Howe’s in particular, impressive in their own right — but none has come close to landing any of the game’s biggest prizes.
If you are going to go down the “winner with a capital W” road, seeking what Carsley described over the weekend as a “world-class coach who has won trophies”, then the homegrown route isn’t really an option for England.
But we are back to the question of De la Fuente and Scaloni — and, yes, Southgate, Joachim Low, Aime Jacquet and so many others through the course of history — and whether international management requires not just a different skill set on the training pitch and the touchline but a different mindset in the weeks and months between international breaks.
If something has changed in the FA’s thinking, leading them to restore trophy-winning experience to the top of the job spec, it is perhaps because of how England’s Euro 2024 unfolded.
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The more talented creative players Southgate had at his disposal, the harder he found it to strike the right tactical balance. As Carsley discovered against Greece last week, picking Jude Bellingham, Bukayo Saka, Cole Palmer, Antony Gordon and Phil Foden in the same line-up might not be the brainwave it had appeared after a 20-minute experiment on the training pitch.
England have a glut of attacking talent — it is hard to fit them all in a team (Jewel Samad/AFP via Getty Images)
Maybe the job requires a firmer hand now. Maybe the surplus of creative players requires the type of toughness and ruthlessness that the modern English coach — a more touchy-feely type, whether it is Southgate, Howe, Potter, Carsley, Gary O’Neil, Rob Edwards, Russell Martin or anyone else except perhaps Sean Dyche — is yet to develop fully.
If Southgate’s approach was considered perfect for the largely unheralded group of players he took to the 2018 World Cup, maybe the changing profile of the squad brings a demand for a different profile of coach, accustomed to working with top-level talents (and perhaps top-level egos) and turning them into a cohesive, balanced team.
One concern is that Tuchel’s Bayern team didn’t look much like that last season when they were beaten to the Bundesliga title for the first time in 12 campaigns. Neither did his Chelsea or PSG teams towards the end. At those three clubs, and indeed Dortmund and Mainz before that, he left in strained circumstances. There were tensions with the boardroom or dressing room or both. It was the biggest thing that deterred Manchester United from appointing him in place of Erik ten Hag last summer.
In other words, Tuchel is very different to the long-held FA ideal of a coach who keeps his head down and says the right thing. And it would be easier to get behind the idea of England being managed by a disruptor — The Rulebreaker, to borrow the delightful title of a biography by German journalists Tobias Schachter and Daniel Meuren — if they had not just enjoyed their best run of tournament campaigns in more than half a century under an unashamed conformist.
Beyond that, surely the England manager should be English. Not must, as some would have it, but should. England have enjoyed notable success under overseas coaches in other sports — and in women’s football — but it does not feel remotely controversial to suggest that the whole point of international sport should be to pit one nation’s talent against others.
There is already a backlash from some quarters against the prospect of a German taking charge of the England team, just as there was anger from the same quarters last month when Carsley did not sing along to the national anthem. At times, when it comes to the national team, the discourse goes far beyond reasonable principles of what international sport should be about and into the type of bombastic, jingoistic rhetoric that held English football back for so many years.
It is largely thanks to overseas influence that English football seems more enlightened these days. Even by the time of Capello’s appointment in 2007, the idea of the FA looking abroad for an England manager seemed far less alarming than it had seven years earlier.
But now, it feels like a regressive step in the message it sends to English coaches.
Carsley took on the interim role but his stint fell flat (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
Carsley’s audition was far from perfect, undermined by his team selection against Greece and the confused messages in some of his media interviews, but he is barely less qualified for the England senior job than Southgate was in 2016. Potter would surely have been in with a shout had this job come up when he was at Brighton & Hove Albion in the summer of 2022, yet he seems to have been overlooked entirely based on a six-month tenure at Chelsea when they were at the height of their post-takeover dysfunction (something with which Tuchel would sympathise). Howe has a desirable job at Newcastle United, but if the eligibility criteria for the England job include winning the game’s biggest prizes, could an English manager ever do that without putting himself far beyond the FA’s reach?
If it comes down to who has the best CV, it is hard to imagine how the best-qualified English coach could trump whichever leading manager happens to be looking for work after falling off the Champions League carousel, having parted ways with PSG, Chelsea, Bayern or whoever — or in Tuchel’s case, all three.
Even so, recent tournaments have strengthened the feeling that the international game is different: that hiring a “winner with a capital W” is not the shortcut to success that the FA previously imagined it was.
Should Tuchel succeed where his predecessor fell agonisingly short, then no England supporter, no matter how ingrained his John Bull tendencies, will find his celebratory fervour dampened by the nationality of the coach.
But Tuchel’s first challenge will be to measure up to the standard Southgate set over the previous eight years — and because this is international football, with its different rhythm and challenges, that is not the foregone conclusion it might otherwise seem.
(Top photo: Sven Hoppe/picture alliance via Getty Images; design: Meech Robinson)