Outsourcing the England manager job to Thomas Tuchel is brilliant – and a damning indictment of English football

When the FA advertised the Three Lions job, it stipulated candidates needed to have won things in English football. That immediately ruled out every single current home-grown coach – which is why Jim White applauds the genius (and sadness) of hiring German Thomas Tuchel

Thomas Tuchel as he is announced as the new England manager at Wembley Stadium (The FA via Getty Images)

Anybody who knows football will recognise that Thomas Tuchel is a brilliant appointment by the FA to become the next England coach. Intense, passionate, tactically innovative and hugely experienced, he knows exactly how to organise a winning team. There is no one else available who can come close to his sustained level of coaching excellence. No one out there in the market is as likely as he is to deliver the prize for which the nation has been waiting for nigh on 60 years.

Yet the very fact the game’s governing body has been obliged to turn to Tuchel is a staggering indictment of the condition of the English game over which they preside.

Not because he is foreign. We have been there before with Sven Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello. And certainly not because he is German. This is a man who speaks English flawlessly, who loves working in England and is a man smart enough to negotiate his way through every hazard in the job.

Even the most trivial. You suspect, for instance, unlike the most recent stand-in in the job, he will outflank his more blockheaded critics by cheerfully singing the National Anthem before games. From what I know of him, he is such an Anglophile he will probably join in a chorus of “Ten German Bombers”.

No, the issue is more fundamental, that when it came to making the appointment there was not a single English coach who matched Tuchel’s candidacy. When the FA published an advertisement for the job, it stipulated they were looking for a manager who had won things in English football. Which immediately ruled out every single current English coach. Not Tuchel, though: he won the Champions League at Chelsea in 2021.

While the German, Spanish and Italian FAs might always be able to hire from their own countrymen who have won things domestically, those in charge of the English game are in no position to do the same. The statistics hint at what a woeful condition our cohort of football management is in: no English coach has won Europe’s top club trophy since Tony Barton picked up the European Cup for Aston Villa in 1982; no Englishman has led a side to the FA Cup since Harry Redknapp lifted it with Portsmouth in 2008; and perhaps most damningly of all, no manager born in this country has ever won the Premier League. As history goes, that is embarrassing.

But then, it is hard for English managers to win anything when all the top clubs in the country are now steered by foreigners. Of Premier League clubs, only three have Englishmen at the helm: Eddie Howe at Newcastle, Gary O’Neil at Wolves and Sean Dyche at Everton. And of that trio, even Howe, the most plausible candidate, could not fulfil the requirements of the FA’s job spec. He has never won anything.

The irony in this is that when the FA backed the formation of the Premier League back in 1992, its stated purpose was to promote the interests of the international team. Such has been the competition’s staggering success, however, benevolent concepts of that nature have been expunged in the universal dash for cash.

Pep Guardiola (right) with Manchester City goalkeeper Ederson (PA Wire)

Foreign investors have poured in with no remit to better the English national set-up. Their priorities lie in filling their own pockets. The Premier League has become the world league, showcasing the very best players from around the globe, corralled by the world’s best coaches.

This is not to suggest that foreign coaches in themselves are detrimental to the wellbeing of the English game. Arsene Wenger and Pep Guardiola both vastly improved the wider standards here.

Their influence has seeped down through the pyramid to the point where non league sides now try to play like they were organised by Guardiola. The problem is the number of them, and the manner in which they have smothered out the local workforce. Like red squirrels, English managers have simply had their turf occupied by outsiders.

Among his many foresighted initiatives while working for the FA, Gareth Southgate attempted to right this glaring omission at the heart of the English game. In 2012, as the FA’s technical director, he instigated the England DNA programme based at St George’s Park, designed to improve the national stock of coaching and coaches. To a degree, it worked on the playing side. Tuchel would not be taking on the job were he not aware of how many technically accomplished players there are available to him.

Graham Potter prior to a Premier League match in October 2022 (Getty)

But the conveyor belt of coaches has simply not materialised in the same way. Some will insist the talent is there, but is not being given the opportunity. Which may well be true, given that even in England’s second tier, the Championship, a competition that should be incubating the next generation of coaching potential, only two of the managers of the top five clubs are English.

The problem is that the clubs themselves recruit on the same basis as the FA: they want proven winners. And so the cycle continues.

Does this matter? Would Manchester City winning the title be more significant if they were coached by Graham Potter rather than Guardiola? Probably not. Maybe it is mere fancy to rail against the gathering transformation in our sport, the manner in which we have become a nation of spectators rather than participants.

Besides if, in two years time, Tuchel wins the World Cup with England, no one will complain. We will be too busy suggesting he arise Sir Thomas.