Tuchel's appointment highlights England's dismal failure to produce tip-top managers
England's top division has only got three English managers. No English boss has won the Premier League. And no English coach has won the European Cup for 40+ years.
The appointment this month of Thomas Tuchel as England’s next permanent manager highlighted again the dearth of high-quality English coaches.
There are only three English managers in the Premier League - Eddie Howe, Sean Dyche and Gary O’Neil - and if you add Graham Potter as another possible successor to Gareth Southgate, they still have a total of zero major trophies, combined.
That fact isn’t meant to disparage that quartet. But the Premier League doesn’t have much Englishness about it, and the 20 clubs mostly don’t fancy Englishmen in charge. They are largely owned by rich foreigners, the majority of the players are foreign, and so are most of the managers.
This has led to a systemic problem not just with the production of home-grown coaches but, vitally, with opportunities for up-and-comers in the top division.
The stats are damning. No English manager has ever won the Premier League title. The last Englishman to win it was Howard Wilkinson in 1991-92 with Leeds in the year before the PL began, and the English winner before him was Howard Kendall with Everton in 1986-87.
By the end of this current season, that pair will be the only English managers to have won the English title in the past 40 years.
The last major English trophy of any kind won by an English manager was 16 years ago, the 2008 FA Cup, lifted by Portsmouth under Harry Redknapp. The Englishman before ‘Arry to manage an FA Cup win was Joe Royle with Everton in 1995.
The last English manager to win the the League Cup / EFL Cup was Steve McClaren in 2004 with Middlesbrough, and before him Brian Little in 1996 with Aston Villa.
It’s more than 40 years since Joe Fagan was the last Englishman to manage the winners of the European Cup / Champions League, which he did with Liverpool in 1984. It’s also more than 40 years since an English manager won the UEFA Cup / Europa League. Keith Burkinshaw, with Spurs, won that trophy in 1984.
Since 1984 the European Cup / CL has been won by coaches from Italy (11 times), Romania (once), Portugal (three times), the Netherlands (four times), Yugoslavia (once), Belgium (once), Germany (seven times), Scotland (twice), Spain (seven times) and France (three times).
On 18 occasions in the last 40 years the European Cup / CL-winning manager has been of a different nationality to the team he led to glory, illustrative of how well managers of other nationalities travel, relative to English managers.
A “manager audit” (graphic below) of the head coaches currently in charge of the 96 clubs in Europe’s “Big 5” divisions highlights the lack of Englishmen, including in England. There are 42 managers working outside their own countries across those 96 clubs. If you want a bigger version of the graphic, it’s in the PDF here:
Some headline observations from this “audit”:
No fewer than 25% of all the ‘Big 5’ managers are Spanish, or 24 of the 96, including 15 working in La Liga and nine elsewhere, including five in the Premier League.
Italians are next best represented (19, with three outside Italy) then Germans (12, with three outside Germany), then Frenchmen (11, all in France).
There are just four English managers across the 96 clubs; the three in the Premier League mentioned above plus Liam Rosenior at Strasbourg. Those four become five if you count Belgian-born Lens manager Will Still as English.
Most of the “biggest” clubs in Europe have foreign managers. All of England’s “big six” clubs - Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham - have foreign managers. Spain’s biggest three clubs- Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid - have foreign managers, as do Germany’s “big two” Bayern and Dortmund plus reigning champions Leverkusen.
France’s three current leading teams - PSG, Monaco and Marseille - all have foreign managers. In Italy there are Italian managers at Juventus, Inter and Napoli but foreign managers at Milan and Roma.
UEFA published their most recent “European Club Talent and Competition Landscape” report last month (PDF to download below) and it included a 14-page section (pages 46-59) about the demographics, experience, mobility, and “lifespans” of head coaches, among much else.
The head coaches section of the report includes the graphic below, which details the nationalities of coaches working abroad in the 2023-24 season. To be clear about definitions, these coaches either worked in one of 1,312 head coach / manager posts at top-division European clubs last season, or as manager of any national team (senior, not age group) anywhere in the world.
No fewer than 50 Spaniards were working outside Spain at top-flight European clubs, with another six in charge of national teams. The corresponding figures for Italians was 37 and eight; for Germans 24 and eight. There were a lot more Portuguese, Serbian, Croatian and Danish coaches working overseas at top-flight clubs last season than English coaches.
Since Tuchel’s appointment, I’ve noticed debates on social media and LinkedIn questioning whether the cost of obtaining a UEFA Pro Licence in England is prohibitive. That is the highest level of coaching qualification in European and mandatory for coaches to work in national leagues across the continent. It costs £13,700 in England, against €6,000 (£5,000) in Spain.
The most recent pan-European data on Pro Licences is from 2017, when there were 2,379 coaches with a Pro Licence in Spain, 861 in Germany, 826 in Italy, 586 in Portugal, 548 in Turkey, 391 in the Czech Republic and 383 in England. Per capita there are many more Pro Licence holders per head in Sweden, Norway, Scotland, Denmark, Croatia, Romania, the Netherlands and Serbia - among other places - than England.
I’m not convinced that pricing is the major issue. Rather it’s opportunity, or lack of it. For all the success of the Premier League as a global brand, it might be the wealth that accrues from that success that means there is more at stake financially than anywhere else. Thus patience is in short supply, and pretty much all clubs will go for experience (often foreign) over taking a chance on an upcoming Englishman.
Other football cultures, not least in Germany, encourage the development of home-grown coaches, who are more often handed opportunities.
Raphael Honigstein spoke well about this with Gary Lineker on a recent episode of The Rest is Football podcast. Raph echoed a lot of my own views, giving particular insight on his native country.
He said there was a pride in Germany that Tuchel had landed the England job, “There's another German manager in a top position. That reflects well on German football, reflects well on German coaching,” he said.
“Why is it that Germany are producing currently so many top coaches? There are a few reasons. First, you can be an under-23 coach, and then you'll be given the chance to actually coach a Bundesliga side. Without that chance, Tuchel might still be somewhere in the under-23s.
“Not only do we produce coaches, but we produce the environment, the ability for coaches to progress and be seen. That is, I think, totally key. Tuchel was an under-23 coach who got a job at Mainz, Nagelsmann was under-23 coach at Hoffenheim, and got the senior job at Hoffenheim.
“[Domenico] Tedesco is another one [who progressed to senior roles via youth coaching]. We have, I think, openness and people taking a chance on coaches like that.
“Then, of course, they still have to do well. They still have to show that they know what they're doing. And I think they know what they're doing because they are obsessed workers. These are people who, 24 hours a day, think about football, work on training practices, watch the games back three or four times, try to come up with new ideas, try to find an edge.
“And they do so because, again, in their clubs, they would have come for a system where you cannot simply buy three or four players to improve the team. The improvement has to come more often than not through the coaching. That is your real edge.
“So it's a different culture. And the third reason is that I think they have grown up in the model where you have shared responsibilities. They're coaches rather than managers.”
So why doesn't England produce these kind of coaches?
“I think it's because of the way the Premier League works. I think the Premier League is a league that attracts the best players from all of the world. And it's just easy to say who has won the league in Germany, who has won the league in Portugal, rather than getting, as used to be the case, somebody from Scotland or somebody who's just done really well in the Championship.
“It just doesn't have that natural progression for English coaches. When was the last time that you heard about an under-23 or a youth coach being promoted to senior job in English football?
”It just doesn't happen. So these coaches, they don't really have the ability to learn on the job. It's very, very difficult if you have a lot of supply, but no real demand, no real possibility to grow as a coach, to keep progressing in an orderly fashion, it's hard.”
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Agree with this Nick - lack of opportunity for English coaches getting the top jobs for a myriad of reasons. But what about English coaches who won things abroad in the 90s Sir Bobby across different clubs in Europe, El Tel at Barca and Roy Hodgson at Inter. Roy in particular is interesting- he did a great job at Fulham getting them to a major cup final - he got the Liverpool job under difficult circumstances (Hicks and Gillett if I remember correctly) and was dismissed after not very long - I'm not a Liverpool fan so I'm sure much more to his short time there.