The search for top class English/British managers.

I was looking at the Premiere League managers and wondered why most EPL managers aren't English/British as well as England preferring foreign managers in the past as well as in the future.

I was reading Harry Redknapp's autobiography and I think he explains it pretty well. I'm typing it from the audiobook version so please excuse any misspelling or punctuation. Sorry for the length, I tried to make it as pithy as possible. I promise it should be worth reading.

....I sometimes get asked whether if I had my career in Premiere League football if I would still go into management as I did in Bournemouth in 1983. The answer has to be no.

...A lot of modern players talk about wanting to get into coaching, but when the reality presents itself, it's not the job they thought it would be. Take Frank Lampard. Now that he's finished at Chelsea, would he really want to take job at, say, Gillingham the way I did at Bournemouth? He might have earned three times as much in one week as the Gillingham manager would earn in one year. The financial imperative that players of my generation faced simply would not be apart of Frank's life.

Let's face it, if you've been earning 200 grand a week, would you take job for 80 grand a year that involves going out every night watching inferior games and inferior players on the off chance of finding a gem? The chairman is driving you mad because he wants success whether it's League 2 or not. And you're commuting to a rotten training ground in the middle of winter with players who aren't in the same class as the lads you've played with you're entire career.

....It's different if a top player is going to walk and manage Chelsea, but in years gone by, that didn't happen.

.....Kenny Dalglish's appointment as the Liverpool manager came as a huge surprise. Everyone else took the less glamorous route...Even Bobby Moore, England's World Cup winning captain. He ended up at Southend United while Sir Bobby Charleton got a job at Preston North End. It made no difference then if you were a great player.

....Mere mortals have a lot to learn. The basics of working with players, finding a way to win, and having to rough it away from the 5 star lifestyle. For the great players now, the top players, this can be hard for them to just walk in and do a job without serving that lower league apprenticeship. They're missing so much by learning the ropes the old way because there's still so much to understand...I can't see too many of today's successful players wanting to do it if they don't need to.

I look at the makeup at the television panel these days and there are some of our best players and brightest minds sitting in the studio! Guys who could've really made a difference. But they don't need the money. So do they want the hassle? I even ask myself that from time to time. In the end, I think all of our young British coaches will end up being ex players from the lower divisions.

...Take Ryan Giggs. It was never even considered that he might follow the Bobby Charleton route and end up at Preston. If he was entering coaching, it was Manchester United or nothing. If Stockport County had phoned him up, I think it would have been the shortest conversation of all time.

Steve Bruce has been around some lower division clubs and was he even considered for the Manchester United job? No. Because a few times in his career, it hasn't worked out. Yet that would be true of Louis Van Gaal too if had spent his managerial life at the likes of at the likes of Sheffield United, Huddersfield Town, or even Hull City. Van Gaal couldn't have done a better job with Hull than Bruce did last year. But did that make a ripple at Old Trafford? So Giggs is not taking that risk.

...Modern players are as likely to be media men or agents as run a team. I don't blame them.

...But how many of this generation of English footballers will be able to find a job higher up? That's the big question now. Foreign players, foreign coaches, foreign owners. It's not just the continental influence.....but the influence of foreign chairmen. There's barely an elite club that's in the hands of a local businessman or a diehard wealthy fan these days....and this has changed the culture of the English game forever.

...Despite all of our best efforts to encourage homegrown talent. I can only see the opportunities for English coaches and players getting fewer. There seems to be a lack of trust in our own football people which started at the top when the FA appointed Sven-Göran Eriksson...

....At club level, the foreign owners come in and, obviously, they only know big names. So it's big names they want. They're not interested in delving into the Championship to give somebody a chance. There are only two ways an up and coming English manager gets a Premiere League job these days: He gets promoted...or takes over a club that looks doomed as Tony Pulis did at Crystal Palace and somehow stays up.

And it's not just top clubs that are foreign-owned these days. Even Derby County and Bournemouth are owned abroad these days. So the old dynamic around English football is altered.

....Even if you look at the England team. Who's the next manager after Roy Hodgson? Who jumps out at ya? Gary Neville? He's never even managed a club. He's not done his apprenticeship, even on the coaching staff at Manchester United. Gareth Southgate is in charge at the U21 level, but I think he should go off and do well in club football before he gets that chance.

 

I typed all that. I wouldn't have typed that much if I just wanted to troll. And I admit that I was looking more at managers at the more "elite clubs" and the national team more than the lower PL clubs. Sorry about the spelling errors again.

 

OK, what's your theory?

 

So you're saying that a top class player has to become a top class manager? That you have to be a top player to be a top manager capable of winning the WC? Was Joachim Löw a top class player?

 

Oh OK, I thought you were saying that the next manager needs to be a player that was an elite player. All you had to say that was that. He was probably writing that because everyone is saying that the likes of Neville and Giggs and Southgate, people that did have successful careers, were on peoples' shortlist to become the next great English/British managers.

He was also going on about the fact that the next crop of young managers might not get their chance to make it because of the owners/FA beginning to rely on foreign coaches and not giving local talent their chance.