Ranieri pulled off a miracle ... so why won’t English clubs touch him?
It was not a bad season for Nantes. they finished seventh, their highest Ligue 1 placing since coming sixth in 2003-04. It wasn’t quite enough to gain entry to the Europa League, but it did get coach Sergio Conceicao the job at Porto. this is where Claudio Ranieri comes in.
He is Conceicao’s successor, the club having got around a French federation rule prohibiting the appointment of coaches over the age of 65. there was a precedent in Lens’ 2007 appointment of Guy Roux at 68, although Ranieri is not a French national. Maybe they just respected Ranieri’s recent achievements. that’s an irony. If Nantes could not have gone ahead with Ranieri, his next move would have been unclear. Certainly there seemed no opening for him in the country where he performed his miracle.
How was the man who won the league title with Leicester just 13 months ago unable to land a job in the Premier League? How was it, when there is a vacancy at Crystal Palace and, in all likelihood, one at Southampton too, that Ranieri was instead tied up in red tape at mid-table Nantes?
However painfully Leicester struggled last season, Ranieri still guided them to the Champions League knock-out stage. Even if he could not sustain the momentum of the 2015-16 season, what he did in that campaign is without doubt the greatest achievement of the Premier League era, and perhaps of all time domestically. Is modern football so obsessed with now that this no longer counts?
Whoever gets the job at Palace or Southampton will have nothing on his c.v. to match Ranieri at Leicester. We already know one candidate for the job at Selhurst Park was Marco Silva. He is lauded for winning the Greek league with Olympiacos. What Ranieri did was the equivalent of winning it with Levadiakos.
It is incredible that the miracle of Leicester has been forgotten so quickly. A manager who had a leftfield title win of such magnitude on his resumé — the Bundesliga with Augsburg, maybe, or La Liga with Osasuna — would be courted by the Premier League elite.
As it is our own competition, and we therefore know every positive and negative nuance, Ranieri can’t even get through the door at St Mary’s.
thomas tuchel, late of Borussia Dortmund, is said to be in contention to succeed Southampton manager Claude Puel. tuchel has a very fine track record. He got Mainz promoted and later into Europe. He won the domestic cup with Dortmund. In his two seasons there, however, he finished 10 and then 18 points behind Bayern Munich, and this season was pegged behind RB Leipzig, too.
None of his achievements compare — not even remotely — to winning the League with Leicester. Yet tuchel has recently been linked with Arsenal, and other major English clubs, in a way Ranieri was not. So it is not just that we fail to value British managers, it is almost as if we hold our own competitions in contempt.
Puel’s last trophy as a manager was in 2000 with Monaco but that made no difference to Southampton a year ago. Only now, having finished eighth in the Premier League and reached the EFL Cup final, does his star appear to have waned.
Had Puel achieved the same level of success at Nantes, say, he would be cited as exactly the sort of promising coach a club like Southampton should want. Indeed, when Leicester sacked Ranieri last February, Nantes coach Conceicao was among those linked with the job.
We know too much about coaches based in England; or we think we do. So sages dismiss Ranieri’s title win as a fluke — as if it is possible to get lucky, and 10 points clear, over 38 matches — or hand all the credit to members of his backroom staff, Craig Shakespeare (right) and Steve Walsh.
Yet Shakespeare had worked with Nigel Pearson for nine seasons prior to Ranieri’s arrival, during which time his highest finish had been 14th in the Premier League. Indeed, he coached as many campaigns in League One as he did in the Premier League during that period.
As for Walsh he has now taken his transfer market acumen to Everton. No doubt he will soon be winning the League for Ronald Koeman, as surely as he did for Ranieri.
We love this conceit in English football: that there is a hidden brain behind the operation and the manager is nothing more than a front.
It wasn’t Kenny Dalglish who won the League for Blackburn, it was Ray Harford; it wasn’t Howard Kendall who took Everton to the top, it was Colin Harvey. Except, when Everton gave the main job to Harvey, he didn’t win the League as Kendall did — and Harford left Blackburn little more than two months into his second season as manager, with the club bottom of the table. Leicester slumped dramatically in Ranieri’s second season and were revived by Shakespeare, enhancing his legend as the secret genius. Yet the average of 1.76 points gained by Leicester in Shakespeare’s 13 games in charge only works out to 67.23 if taken over a whole season — and Leicester won the League with 81. the Shakespeare mean would have seen them finish fourth in 2015-16, or seventh in the most recent campaign. Either would be a fine finish in the
circumstances, but neither is a match for ranieri’s miracle.
and where has it got him? Nantes. once among the strongest and most important clubs in France — Didier Deschamps, Marcel Desailly, Claude Makelele and Christian Karembeu all came through there — now eased out by bigger and wealthier rivals.
In the last decade, Nantes have spent as many seasons outside Ligue 1 as they have in it, and their last trophy came in 2001.
In the top half of the table for the first time in 13 years, it would need a miracle for them to compete with the likes of Monaco, Marseille and Paris Saint-germain.
of course, they may feel ranieri’s track record makes him just the man for that; he just isn’t the man for Southampton or Crystal Palace.