Premier League clubs will hire more British coaches when more of them prove they’re good

Like Japanese knotweed, like the Terminator, some arguments simply will not die. Whenever a Premier League vacancy appears — and given the levels of patience in football at the moment, this is a fairly regular thing — then into that space pours the ongoing argument about why English managers aren’t getting these jobs. Nature abhors a vacuum, so they say. Be nice if nature could get over itself.

The latest episode was sparked by sackings at Leicester City and Everton, and exacerbated by the subsequent appointment of Frenchman Claude Puel to the Leicester job. Sam Allardyce, patron saint of the overlooked Englishman, lamented that homegrown coaches are “deemed as second class,” and suggested that “the Premier League is the foreign league in England now.” Meanwhile Phil Neville came out strongly in favour of David Unsworth receiving the Everton job permanently, on the basis that:

“I keep reading about his lack of experience. Everton’s a special club. You’ve got to have a certain quality to be a manager: you’ve got to understand the people. You’ve got to understand the crowd and what they want, and the style of football that’s made Everton great over the years. And I think David Unsworth has got more experience than any of the other candidates that are applying for that job when it comes to Everton [...] He’s been at the club as a player, he’s been at the club as a supporter, and now he’s been at the club as an under-23 coach.”

Looking beyond the basic parochialism, one of the more interesting wrinkles of this whole conversation is that the English coaches in the conversation, at least at Premier League level, don’t have a huge amount in common. There isn’t really any emergent “English school,” a homegrown parallel to the ideologically similar coaches that have recently popped out of Borussia Dortmund. Eddie Howe and Sean Dyche don’t have much in common beyond their passport, and their admirable overachievement with unfashionable football clubs.

This isn’t necessarily a problem — football is always an ongoing argument with a variety of acceptable answers — but it is important to the overall conversation. Consider Neville’s broadside in favour of David Unsworth, and the “certain quality” he’s praising. He attaches this to a “style of football that’s made Everton great,” but Unsworth’s direct experience of Everton’s greatness came only as a youth player. Neville’s assertion, then, is of something more obscure, perhaps even a little mystical. Unsworth knows what Everton should be. He has a connection. He just gets it.

Such a connection is by its very nature inaccessible to, say, Thomas Tuchel, who has spent the last few years mucking around in Germany rather than immersing himself in Everton’s special Evertonness. It is, in fact, unavailable to anybody who doesn’t happen to already have it, or isn’t able to spend years with Everton to acquire it. It is, in its own way, rather like a nationality.

This mysticism isn’t just necessary because something has to go on the CV in place of the trophies, impressive league finishes, and varied experience of which many pesky foreigners can boast. It also permits the conversation to move from one of ability to one of identity. Everton need an Evertonian because who else, beyond an Evertonian, could understand Everton? The logic is circular, but that’s the point: this isn’t really a question about how football should be done, but an assertion about who should get to do it. The answer has already been assumed before the question has been asked.

There is, perhaps, an existential motivation at the heart of all this. Richard Keys, tweeting from Doha-upon-Thames, greeted the appointment of Claude Puel — title-winner with Monaco, Champions League semifinalist with Lyon, cup finalist with Southampton — with “British coaching RIP.” And while Keys is a ridiculous human being, this is a revealing sentiment. It suggests that one of the purposes of British football is to enable British coaching to reproduce itself. And if it is not allowed to, it will die.

(Why British and not English? Probably something to do with Brendan Rodgers. In truth the lines are a little blurry, since the English league, by virtue of its standard and its money, tends to end up attracting the best players and coaches from around the UK. Also the English tend to assume that anybody who ends up in England secretly wants to be one of them, deep down.)

Again, this comes back to the question of what British or English coaching actually is, and if it means anything coherent beyond “coaches that come from where they coach.” For it feels, at the moment, like a fairly useless concept. Perhaps there has been a tacit acknowledgement of this from England’s FA, who set up St. George’s Park as part of their ongoing crusade to identify, and nurture, an English DNA to succeed alongside Spain and Germany.

One thing we can say for certain, though, is that simply giving big jobs to British managers is not going to do anything for this cause. We know this because in recent years we have been given a test case on the grandest scale of all. David Moyes got the Manchester United job. David Moyes made a mess of the Manchester United job. And then David Moyes lost the Manchester United job. It doesn’t matter if he got it because he was British, even though it’s tough to see what else about his CV recommended him. We already knew that Britishness wasn’t necessary for success; Moyes demonstrated that it also isn’t sufficient.

There are plenty more granular questions folded into the whole debate too, of course. Whether success at Burnley can beget success at Everton, and whether success at Everton can beget success at Manchester United. Whether British coaches need to seek apprenticeships or win titles abroad, and whether they are equipped to do so. Whether there are elements of fashion and faddishness in the recruitment process, or whether the cardinal virtues of English football are simply out of date. You’d imagine that Dyche, at the very least, will be given a bigger budget in the near future, which should prove instructive.

Ultimately, there is no reason why British, or English, or even Evertonian coaching cannot mean something useful, something worth promoting. But if it describes “what Sean Dyche is doing but also what Eddie Howe is doing and what David Unsworth might do,” then it’s too vague to be any use. And if it means nothing more than British coaches doing well, then its exponents probably have to acknowledge that the path to such success is not through promotions granted on the basis of nationality. At some point, the football matches have to be won. And nobody ever did that with a passport.