What is ‘English football’? The truth is it no longer exists
ometimes you have to let go of a belief. One of mine was that experience of English football culture is advantageous for anyone wanting to manage here. The truth now dawns. There is no English football culture.
If there was, it has been erased. You might still find it at parks level, where people elbow each other in the mush, and the referee has to keep a watchful eye for touchline lunatics, but there is now no recognisable ‘English football culture’ in the upper reaches of the game. Which is why the cosmopolitan nature of Premier League dugouts is no longer remarkable.
The title race will probably be contested between an Italian in his first season in England (Antonio Conte) and an Argentine (Mauricio Pochettino) who prompted outrage when he succeeded Nigel Adkins at Southampton. Yes, there was a time when Pochettino’s touchdown on Hampshire soil was cast as a superficial gamble in the European coaching market at the expense of a solid British yeoman.
Now, the lack of opportunities for British coaches and managers in English football remains vexing. Ideally, home-grown tracksuit wearers would see a ‘pathway’ through the system to the best jobs. As things stand, Tony Pulis at West Bromwich Albion is an outlier for the home contingent. And Sam Allardyce is doing his Sam Allardyce thing at Crystal Palace. Eddie Howe remains the most likely golden boy. But are any of them the custodians of an ‘English way’, an English tradition? Of course not.
Globalisation has swallowed England’s fading story. A Premier League of foreign-owned clubs staffed by overseas managers and largely non-English players has no tradition for the Portuguese or Italian or Spanish coach to bow to. I confess to thinking for far too long that ‘culture shock’ was a potential hindrance to the newly arrived Eurocrat, with his stock observations: “Important player” and “We are in a good/bad moment”.
Unfamiliarity with the English way has hardly been a handicap to Marco Silva at Hull. Nor did it seem to befuddle Conte at Chelsea.
People say Pep Guardiola has been bamboozled by English football, at least in his belief that everything starts with a sweeping pass from the goalkeeper. But these ideas would come under strain just about anywhere outside of Barcelona – and certainly in a team of veteran fullbacks and Nicolás Otamendi at centre-back.
If culture shock persists, it pretty much relates only to fixture overload, media intensity and the absence of a winter break, which Jürgen Klopp, for one, clearly hates.
Yet almost no foreign manager can be said to have been flummoxed purely by the way the game is played in England, for the simple reason that there is no longer a credible definition of English football, in a top division where only a third of players are eligible to be picked by Gareth Southgate.
England’s new manager is trying to forge an identity for the national side because it has long since ceased to have one. Southgate’s canvas is blank.
Ten years ago you could have asked someone in the street, “What is English football?” and they might have said: “Power, physicality, set-pieces, direct play, energy, determination.”
At grass-roots amateur level, you can still hear a game a couple of miles imbledon, for so long the annual burial ground of British tennis, must be allowing itself the strawberry-exploding fantasy of a home double in the men’s and women’s singles.
After Johanna Konta’s win in the Miami Open moved her to No 7 in the world, a British brace of Sir Andy Murray and Konta (right) on away, and people still talk about “battling” and “getting stuck in”. In the elite professional game “battling” is simply a dated term for a basic duty that applies across every major league. It means application, work-rate, leadership, taking responsibility.
In other words, these are not Centre Court is almost too outlandish to imagine. Konta has an uninspiring record at the All England Club, but equally the draw has been unkind to her. She has won one round in five appearances. You would expect more from someone based in Eastbourne. Yet such is the pace of her improvement that a ‘English virtues’. The English game has nothing unique to sell. ‘English football’ is whatever foreign owners and managers say it is. On the pitch, that is. In the stands, a more resilient kind of allegiance prevails, though many supporters complain about the gentrification of Premier League audiences. On the field, though, Mike Phelan giving way to Silva at Hull is not a gamble on ‘inexperience’, because a well-picked foreign coach arrives with the skills to overcome any culture gap, if such a gap exists in a dressing room of 10 or 15 nationalities. Pochettino, clearly, has moved English football on, adding steel and tactical flexibility to Spurs, who were stuck in a comfort zone. Conte has made an orchestra of Chelsea’s assorted instruments. Paul Clement, Swansea’s possible saviour, has probably learnt as much from following Carlo Ancelotti to Real Madrid and Bayern Munich as he did in his Olde English apprenticeship in this country. English managers are entitled to expect a fair hearing when the best jobs fall vacant. The system needs incentives and openings for those who start at the bottom here. But no longer can we pretend a British manager has an advantage in understanding the ‘English culture’, because there is no longer any such thing. Pochettino has as much chance of drawing the best from Dele Alli or Eric Dier, because the Premier League has internationalised itself to the point where, as an entertainment form, it is everywhere and nowhere. If ‘local knowledge’ is an empty boast, English managers are going to have to compete on talent and intelligence alone. As the outsider, the foreign coach has another advantage. He is unencumbered by the heavy sack of myths his English counterpart is doomed to carry. Wimbledon win is starting to seem feasible.
Murray, the defending men’s champion, and Konta, 25, found their own way to prominence, largely outside the Lawn Tennis Association system.
But nobody would care about that if both were to win on successive summer afternoons. Wimbledon would bust its corset.