Old guard blocking England’s next wave
Of eight British managers in the Premier League, only one is below the age of 40
Sam Allardyce sat down in a television studio in Doha, Qatar. It was Oct. 27, two days after Everton had fired Ronald Koeman as its manager, and four since Leicester City had appointed Claude Puel, a Frenchman, to the same post.
Allardyce was appearing on a beIN Sports to discuss what co-host Richard Keys described as the “glass ceiling” faced by English managers.
Allardyce has long championed the idea that British coaches are overlooked by Premier League clubs in thrall to exotic imports.
In 2010, he declared that he was better “suited” to managing Real Madrid or Manchester United than his then employers, Blackburn Rovers. Two years later, he decreed that he would have been a Champions League coach if only he had a more glamorous surname.
In Keys and his broadcast partner, Andy Gray, Allardyce knew he had a sympathetic audience. He appeared on the same show last December to claim that the Premier League’s top six were appointing “branded” foreign coaches because they held more global appeal.
A couple of days before his October appearance, Keys had tweeted that Leicester’s appointment of Puel sounded a death knell for British coaching.
“The Premier League is a foreign league in England,” Allardyce told Keys and Gray.
Allardyce should be delighted, then, at the events of the last two weeks. Leicester might have followed the fashion for the foreign, but West Ham did not: It has appointed David Moyes, a Scot, to replace its Croatian coach, Slaven Bilic. And Everton seems set to follow. Within a few days of his appearance in Doha, Allardyce himself was reported to have held talks with Farhad Moshiri, the club’s largest shareholder, over Koeman’s former position.
Allardyce’s passion for British coaches is matched only by his prescience. A week after he had appeared with Keys and Gray in December last year, he was appointed as manager of Crystal Palace.
Two weeks after his most recent remarks, he is in line to return to work again. It is almost as if he sets out to make himself visible — and his employment a moral, as well as professional, issue — whenever he suspects opportunities may arise. They say sharks can sense blood in the water.
The reality is that the appointment of Moyes, and the prospective return of “Big Sam,” will not be cause for celebration for any British coaches other than the two men themselves. On the surface, nobody has done more to highlight the plight of British managers than Allardyce and Moyes. Beneath it, both men — and those like them — are part of the problem, not the solution.
There are 92 clubs in the four professional divisions of English soccer. At the time of writing, 22 have for- eign coaches. Precisely half those men work in the Premier League, and among those 11 are the bosses at all six of the teams — Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, Liverpool, Manchester City and Manchester United — that might reasonably hope to win the title at the start of any given season.
That number has been slowly increasing in recent years, giving rise to the broadly held, largely accepted assumption, as voiced by Allardyce, that foreign managers are blocking the path of England’s own bright young things.
The premise does not, though, stand up to scrutiny. Four of the top six clubs have been managed by a Briton at least once in the last decade: Alex Ferguson and Moyes at Manchester United; Kenny Dalglish and Brendan Rodgers at Liverpool; Harry Redknapp and Tim Sherwood at Tottenham; Mark Hughes at Manchester City.
The six top clubs see themselves as Champions League clubs. It is reasonable for them to believe that the most qualified candidates for their managerial posts are those who have managed Champions League clubs previously.
Those candidates, logically, are most often found abroad.
It is below them where the real problem lies. Of the eight — nine, if Allardyce is appointed at Everton — British managers in the Premier League, only one, Bournemouth’s Eddie Howe, is under age 40. Only two more — Burnley’s Sean Dyche and Swansea City’s Paul Clement — are under 50.
The rest range from 54 (Moyes, now installed at West Ham, and Hughes at Stoke) to 70 (Roy Hodgson, Palace’s latest manager). Between them, and including Allardyce, they have held 25 Premier League jobs.
The second-tier Championship has the same problem: Seven of its 24 managers are foreign, and only five of the 17 British coaches in the division are 40 or under.
It is that lack of imagination from clubs that makes English managers seem so limited compared to their continental peers and ensures that English managers are always adopting German, Italian or Spanish concepts and styles: these are the same old ideas, riddled with the same old flaws, regurgitated again and again.
It is that misidentification of failure as experience, too, that explains why British coaching remains so steadfastly white — the same old faces means the same old colour — and why the Premier League’s most ambitious teams are now, increasingly, managed by foreigners.
It is not that those teams do not want to appoint locally; realistically, they cannot. They look at the proving grounds of the lower reaches of the Premier League — Howe and Dyche aside — and into the Championship, where the future should be, and see only the past.
There is nothing wrong with Allardyce’s conclusion. There are too few opportunities for young English coaches. It is his explanation that is incorrect. The imports are not blocking the road: it is Allardyce, and those he represents, standing in the way.