Rumor: Next England Manager Thread Discussion

horrisengleton · Oct 20, 2024

Khan said: ↑

Meh, I wouldn't consider Tuchel "elite."

I'd consider Pep, Klopp, and Ancelotti the "elite" in today's game.

The next tranche of managers, I'd include Tuchel, Flick, and perhaps Simeone.

Regardless of anyone's classification, Tuchel is not "elite." More cogently to the discussion, there are no native English-speaking managers that are even "good." This stoopid clamoring for an English manager is both idiotic jingoism, and a fool's errand all in one.

England supporters should be beyond thrilled at this appointment, full stop.
Click to expand...

Good analysis. Have you considered offering your services to professional clubs?

ChristianSur · Oct 20, 2024

Fireburn47 said: ↑

Thomas Tuchel managing England defeats point of international sport
https://www.thetimes.com/sport/foot...any-national-anthem-dscd5vbnr?t=1729446956762

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

England has a football culture spanning three centuries and richest domestic league, so the appointment of a foreign manager is a failure of such magnitude it should have been accompanied by the resignation of FA chief executive, Mark Bullingham

After Egypt faced Mauritania in their Africa Cup of Nations qualifier on October 11 their manager, Hossam Hassan, made an unusual offer. The teams were due to meet again four days later in the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, on a dubious artificial surface. “If any player asks me not to play, I will agree,” Hassan said. “The Mauritanian team plays hard and with violent interventions, and their field is not the best.” As a result of this, and the kicking he received in the first game, Mohamed Salah returned home early.

Mauritania are ranked 112th in the world, between North Korea and Azerbaijan. They have never made it to a World Cup and reached their first Afcon tournament in 2019. Hassan clearly thinks they do not know how to tackle, either. So if the Mauritanian federation employed foreign coaches in an attempt to make its national team more competitive, this could be classed as a development project, and even encouraged.

England, however, is not Mauritania. England presumes to sing about football coming home. England says it invented the game. England is not in development. It is developed. It has a football culture spanning three centuries, the oldest international team in world football, and the richest domestic league. So for England to appoint a foreign manager is a failure of such magnitude it should have been accompanied by the resignations of the FA chief executive, Mark Bullingham, his technical director, John McDermott, and quite probably chairwoman Debbie Hewitt too.

Eight years, the FA has had to plan for Gareth Southgate’s departure. Eight years to make good on its precious pathways, or to alight on a capable English coach from the club game. And it couldn’t find one. Not one. Its system, its best practice, hasn’t produced a single Englishman trusted to manage the national team. It’s time to go.

Anyone who thinks Thomas Tuchel is the right man for this job has no understanding of international sport and what it is supposed to be about. This has nothing to do with his capability as a manager. Tuchel is a fine manager. The biggest mistake Chelsea made was getting rid of him. He is an impressive person, an impressive tactician and motivator. He will surely do well for England given the players at his disposal. Yet that is not the point.

There is only one point, really, given the nature of this job. The England manager should be English, or a product of the English coaching system. Instead, Bullingham and McDermott have used the wealth of English football to game the system and cover their failing to provide an adequate succession, which is tantamount to cheating. International sport must always be about where you’re from as much as where you’re at and, if it isn’t, scrap it. If this is now just another strand of the club game, except with less at stake and fewer watchable matches, it is worthless. Unless it is the best of ours against the best of theirs, better to let exhausted players have a rest.

The old cliché is that no one will care if we win the World Cup with a foreign coach, but that’s not strictly true. Some of us will. Those who value international competition will, or should, care. Those who believe that the strength of English football means it should stand on its own two feet will care. And insults are hurled at those people: Little Englander, xenophobe.

Yet the real Little Englanders are the ones who think this island is so exceptional it should still plunder how and where it pleases. They decry those who want an English England manager while smugly thinking their attitude is cosmopolitan, not colonialist. Yet what is more imperialist than seeing international competition as the best of theirs versus the best of ours, plus some of theirs if we fear ours aren’t good enough? Is it any wonder our terrace anthems are so obnoxious when the attitude of the FA’s senior executives is: we’re England and we poach who we want?

“I feel we owe it to the players and the country to give them the support and leadership to get them over the line,” Bullingham simpered and, yes, you do. But not like this. Not by neglecting your duty to the development of the national game and simply throwing money at a perceived short-term fix. And if England win the 2026 World Cup? What next? After the party, the parade, the hasty production of a new range of England shirts to be flogged for profit with an extra gold star over the badge?

There have been 39 editions of the men’s World Cup and European Championship and 38 have been won by homegrown managers. The exception is Greece, with Otto Rehhagel, at the 2004 Euros. And after defeating Portugal in that final, when was that country’s next competitive victory over what would be termed a major football nation? It was two weeks ago, against England at Wembley. So more than 20 years.

Greece did not even qualify for the next World Cup, in 2006, and defending their title at the 2008 European Championship they lost every game. There was no golden generation produced or inspired by naked opportunism. Since becoming European champions with a German manager in 2004, Greece have won three matches at major international competitions, against Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Russia. They have made it out of the group stage twice — and lost their first knockout game both times.

Tuchel is a good manager but given an 18-month contract and a remit to win at all costs, what does he care for the future? After the win in Finland this month there was a lot of positive talk around Angel Gomes, described in several quarters as Lee Carsley’s great gift to his successor. Gomes has made two starts for England, both against Finland, who are nobody’s idea of a real test. He clearly needs further opportunities against teams of substance. Yet if Tuchel does not see him as featuring for England short-term, where is the imperative to consider the long?

The same applies to Rico Lewis, Tino Livramento, Levi Colwill, Noni Madueke, James Trafford, Jarrad Branthwaite, Jarell Quansah, Adam Wharton, even Kobbie Mainoo — some will be retained, but the way the FA has framed Tuchel’s mission he is under no obligation to think beyond here, and now. “The job is bigger than picking and coaching the team,” Stuart Pearce said but not the way it’s been sold to Tuchel. The age-group players are only of relevance if they can be useful in time for summer 2026. If not, why should he care?

Eddie Jones arrived in England with a similar job spec in 2016. There to win the 2019 Rugby World Cup. And, when he fell just short — and that can happen, to even the best coaches — it all unravelled very quickly because he was passing through. That’s another old trope: that no one minds when it’s rugby or cricket or any of the other sports in which England have sold out while still claiming historic superiority. Well, some of us do. Jones, Duncan Fletcher, Trevor Bayliss, Brendon McCullum, even Jürgen Gröbler guiding British rowing’s dominance in successive Olympics, it is all a betrayal of what international competition is supposed to test. Your system, your process, your athletic prowess as a nation. That you have it right, top to bottom.

A country cannot win the World Cup without a good team, a good squad and good management, except the FA wishes to circumvent that last part to buy its way to the pinnacle instead. “If you look at St George’s Park overall, it has been a really good success,” Bullingham wheedled. “Our pathway is really strong, both from a coaches’ and a players’ point of view.” That’s a falsehood. On his watch, England have ended up with a foreign coach of both senior men’s and women’s teams. That’s not a strong pathway. That’s the opposite.

Equally, Sarina Wiegman is often cited as proof that no one cares about the coach’s passport if we win, except we didn’t win that European Championship. Not if we’re truthful. Us, and the Netherlands, won it, just as us, and Germany, will win the World Cup if Tuchel delivers. To pretend otherwise is, well, quite xenophobic. Forget what is engraved on the trophy. What are we scared of, if failing to acknowledge our debt to a foreign nation’s system?

Wiegman did not need us to become a European champion because she had already done that, with her own country, in 2017. What we can say with certainty, however, is that England’s record in the competition showed we needed her. The same with the World Cup. She reached the final as Dutch manager in 2019. England had never got that far until she turned up. So, for England’s women, this has been an Anglo-Dutch collaboration, an Anglo-Dutch period of success, for which Bullingham wishes to credit some fictitious pathway of the FA’s creation.

As always, when the FA fails, panics and appoints a foreign manager, it tries to anglicise him for public consumption. Tuchel, we are told, is an Anglophile besotted by this country and its football culture. The same line was used about Sven-Goran Eriksson. It even tried it with Fabio Capello. And I’m sure Tuchel, like other managers who have worked here across many years such as Arsène Wenger, Pep Guardiola, Rafa Benítez or José Mourinho, must have found something about the place they enjoyed. Then again, I appreciate German expressionism and Kraftwerk, Can and Popol Vuh; I’ll argue Goethe’s significance beside Shakespeare; I love Berlin and the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder; I’ve watched the five-hour version of Das Boot straight; Reisling’s great; so is Schnitzel; my auntie Pat married a lovely German man and they live in Hanover. All of this makes me quite the Teutophile. Wouldn’t get me a position with the Germany national team, though. Wouldn’t get me through the door. The German federation has too great a sense of sporting identity for that.

The FA does not. That’s why it appoints a German, then keeps trying to tell us how English he is. Notice how much play Anthony Barry is getting? He’s Tuchel’s assistant and he’s a Liverpudlian. “One of the very best young English coaches,” Bullingham called him. What does he want, credit for getting an Englishman involved with the England team? Let’s see how much fanfare there is if, as expected, Tuchel appoints Hilario, who is Portuguese, as his goalkeeping coach.

Meanwhile, it’s painted as a triumph of negotiation that a man who was available on the day Gareth Southgate resigned as England manager — July 16, 2024 — can start work in January 2025. Actually, Bayern Munich’s statement about Tuchel said his working time at the club ended officially on June 30, 2024, so the FA could have begun talks with him on July 1, the day after England limped past Slovakia in Gelsenkirchen in the European Championship round of 16. Actually, scrap that. Bayern announced that Tuchel was done come the end of the season on February 21, 2024, so the sounding out in the event of Southgate’s departure could have taken place, discreetly, close to a year ago. Instead the FA is retrofitting a tale of ten interviews to its timeline in an attempt to prove that no stone went unturned. Yet one by one, supposed candidates from Eddie Howe to Graham Potter and Carlo Ancelotti claim they were not approached.

So here we are. It is now said that Tuchel won’t even start scouting English games until next year and most presume contractual or economic complications. An alternate view? What would be his first duty as manager if he walked into the job now? It would be the announcement of his squad for matches against Greece and Ireland on November 14 and 17. And when does that reveal traditionally take place? The Thursday before. In this case, November 7. See the complication? The FA has long been veterans of football’s poppy wars — we could argue they started them — and heaven forbid one of its employees is seen without one, when in season. And now they’re pushing a German manager out front four days before Remembrance Sunday? When Eriksson flew in from Rome to give his first press conference around this time in 2000 he appeared before the camera wearing a poppy too. I asked the then FA executive, David Davies, where a Swedish manager arriving from Italy had acquired it. “I’ll explain after,” he said. That was 25 years ago. Still waiting.

And Tuchel, decent man that he is, has been bending over backwards to accommodate the demands of his new role. He didn’t even rule out singing the anthem. But he shouldn’t, or at the very least Bullingham should intervene to save him the trouble. He’s not our performing seal. He shouldn’t try to fit in with us. If the FA wanted the PR schtick — the unicorns, the unity, the imaginary pathways — it should have been on the telephone to Howe and Newcastle United the moment it was known Southgate was leaving. Too complicated, too difficult.

So let’s make clear what this is: the desperate ploy of an organisation that has nothing to offer but money. Tuchel shouldn’t need to wear flowers, sing about God saving his king or buy into any of the ludicrous spin the FA advances to cover its shallowness. Just go out and be your own man, Thomas, be a German managing England. And if you do win it and are looking around the Metlife Stadium for someone to share a nationalist sing-song, I’ll make sure I know all the words to salute the victors. It’s still that one by Haydn, right?

Fifa should implement these rules on international football
I never like to identify a problem without advancing a solution, so here’s what Fifa’s rules on international management should be. First, there should be two categories: countries that must have a domestic incumbent and countries that remain unrestricted for development purposes. Limitations should apply not only to the manager but to the entire coaching staff, all those who have a direct effect on the team.

These are the countries that should not be allowed a foreign manager:

• Any nation that has won the World Cup
• Any nation that has been champion of its own continent
• Any nation that has spent the past ten years inside Fifa’s top 100

There will have to be judgment calls on whether Czechoslovakia conquering Europe in 1976 counts as both countries winning it, or neither, and how far back the count goes — Sudan were a force in African football half a century ago, for instance — but the basic principle should be that a country established enough to be a world or continental champion should be able to maintain a strong domestic football culture from that point. England, as World Cup winners in 1966 and never lower than 27th since rankings began, would be disqualified on two counts. That’s what makes this so embarrassing.

Anthems mean something – just ask Freddie Flintoff
A final point on the anthem. Under The Southern Cross I Stand is the victory song of the Australia cricket team. The story is told that after one Ashes Test the teams had got together for a drink, and Freddie Flintoff was the last Englishman remaining in the Australian dressing room. As his hosts prepared to start the singing, he stayed. “How does this one go?” he asked. He was ushered politely, but firmly, back to his own side. Some things aren’t for sharing, not even among friends. And where you’re from matters.

Click to expand...

Set aside the narcissistic guff and I think Samuel has a point here. We can probably skip the self-flagellation when, as mentioned by others, Spain won the Euros with two French centre-backs and Italy/Portugal routinely pick Brazilians who are no more Italian/Portuguese than Falcao is English, but they're papering over the cracks when they do that, and so are we by appointing Tuchel. Arguably even moreso, as you only need to find one coach of the required standard who's available and interested, and the FA clearly feel that we don't even have that - it's like turning up to a one-a-side World Cup with a ringer. Yes, Tuchel's track record is significantly more impressive than any of the English candidates. That's exactly the problem, and you'd hope that we'd have made more progress towards the solution by now.

TRS-T · Oct 20, 2024

Fireburn47 said: ↑

Thomas Tuchel managing England defeats point of international sport
https://www.thetimes.com/sport/foot...any-national-anthem-dscd5vbnr?t=1729446956762

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

England has a football culture spanning three centuries and richest domestic league, so the appointment of a foreign manager is a failure of such magnitude it should have been accompanied by the resignation of FA chief executive, Mark Bullingham

After Egypt faced Mauritania in their Africa Cup of Nations qualifier on October 11 their manager, Hossam Hassan, made an unusual offer. The teams were due to meet again four days later in the Mauritanian capital, Nouakchott, on a dubious artificial surface. “If any player asks me not to play, I will agree,” Hassan said. “The Mauritanian team plays hard and with violent interventions, and their field is not the best.” As a result of this, and the kicking he received in the first game, Mohamed Salah returned home early.

Mauritania are ranked 112th in the world, between North Korea and Azerbaijan. They have never made it to a World Cup and reached their first Afcon tournament in 2019. Hassan clearly thinks they do not know how to tackle, either. So if the Mauritanian federation employed foreign coaches in an attempt to make its national team more competitive, this could be classed as a development project, and even encouraged.

England, however, is not Mauritania. England presumes to sing about football coming home. England says it invented the game. England is not in development. It is developed. It has a football culture spanning three centuries, the oldest international team in world football, and the richest domestic league. So for England to appoint a foreign manager is a failure of such magnitude it should have been accompanied by the resignations of the FA chief executive, Mark Bullingham, his technical director, John McDermott, and quite probably chairwoman Debbie Hewitt too.

Eight years, the FA has had to plan for Gareth Southgate’s departure. Eight years to make good on its precious pathways, or to alight on a capable English coach from the club game. And it couldn’t find one. Not one. Its system, its best practice, hasn’t produced a single Englishman trusted to manage the national team. It’s time to go.

Anyone who thinks Thomas Tuchel is the right man for this job has no understanding of international sport and what it is supposed to be about. This has nothing to do with his capability as a manager. Tuchel is a fine manager. The biggest mistake Chelsea made was getting rid of him. He is an impressive person, an impressive tactician and motivator. He will surely do well for England given the players at his disposal. Yet that is not the point.

There is only one point, really, given the nature of this job. The England manager should be English, or a product of the English coaching system. Instead, Bullingham and McDermott have used the wealth of English football to game the system and cover their failing to provide an adequate succession, which is tantamount to cheating. International sport must always be about where you’re from as much as where you’re at and, if it isn’t, scrap it. If this is now just another strand of the club game, except with less at stake and fewer watchable matches, it is worthless. Unless it is the best of ours against the best of theirs, better to let exhausted players have a rest.

The old cliché is that no one will care if we win the World Cup with a foreign coach, but that’s not strictly true. Some of us will. Those who value international competition will, or should, care. Those who believe that the strength of English football means it should stand on its own two feet will care. And insults are hurled at those people: Little Englander, xenophobe.

Yet the real Little Englanders are the ones who think this island is so exceptional it should still plunder how and where it pleases. They decry those who want an English England manager while smugly thinking their attitude is cosmopolitan, not colonialist. Yet what is more imperialist than seeing international competition as the best of theirs versus the best of ours, plus some of theirs if we fear ours aren’t good enough? Is it any wonder our terrace anthems are so obnoxious when the attitude of the FA’s senior executives is: we’re England and we poach who we want?

“I feel we owe it to the players and the country to give them the support and leadership to get them over the line,” Bullingham simpered and, yes, you do. But not like this. Not by neglecting your duty to the development of the national game and simply throwing money at a perceived short-term fix. And if England win the 2026 World Cup? What next? After the party, the parade, the hasty production of a new range of England shirts to be flogged for profit with an extra gold star over the badge?

There have been 39 editions of the men’s World Cup and European Championship and 38 have been won by homegrown managers. The exception is Greece, with Otto Rehhagel, at the 2004 Euros. And after defeating Portugal in that final, when was that country’s next competitive victory over what would be termed a major football nation? It was two weeks ago, against England at Wembley. So more than 20 years.

Greece did not even qualify for the next World Cup, in 2006, and defending their title at the 2008 European Championship they lost every game. There was no golden generation produced or inspired by naked opportunism. Since becoming European champions with a German manager in 2004, Greece have won three matches at major international competitions, against Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Russia. They have made it out of the group stage twice — and lost their first knockout game both times.

Tuchel is a good manager but given an 18-month contract and a remit to win at all costs, what does he care for the future? After the win in Finland this month there was a lot of positive talk around Angel Gomes, described in several quarters as Lee Carsley’s great gift to his successor. Gomes has made two starts for England, both against Finland, who are nobody’s idea of a real test. He clearly needs further opportunities against teams of substance. Yet if Tuchel does not see him as featuring for England short-term, where is the imperative to consider the long?

The same applies to Rico Lewis, Tino Livramento, Levi Colwill, Noni Madueke, James Trafford, Jarrad Branthwaite, Jarell Quansah, Adam Wharton, even Kobbie Mainoo — some will be retained, but the way the FA has framed Tuchel’s mission he is under no obligation to think beyond here, and now. “The job is bigger than picking and coaching the team,” Stuart Pearce said but not the way it’s been sold to Tuchel. The age-group players are only of relevance if they can be useful in time for summer 2026. If not, why should he care?

Eddie Jones arrived in England with a similar job spec in 2016. There to win the 2019 Rugby World Cup. And, when he fell just short — and that can happen, to even the best coaches — it all unravelled very quickly because he was passing through. That’s another old trope: that no one minds when it’s rugby or cricket or any of the other sports in which England have sold out while still claiming historic superiority. Well, some of us do. Jones, Duncan Fletcher, Trevor Bayliss, Brendon McCullum, even Jürgen Gröbler guiding British rowing’s dominance in successive Olympics, it is all a betrayal of what international competition is supposed to test. Your system, your process, your athletic prowess as a nation. That you have it right, top to bottom.

A country cannot win the World Cup without a good team, a good squad and good management, except the FA wishes to circumvent that last part to buy its way to the pinnacle instead. “If you look at St George’s Park overall, it has been a really good success,” Bullingham wheedled. “Our pathway is really strong, both from a coaches’ and a players’ point of view.” That’s a falsehood. On his watch, England have ended up with a foreign coach of both senior men’s and women’s teams. That’s not a strong pathway. That’s the opposite.

Equally, Sarina Wiegman is often cited as proof that no one cares about the coach’s passport if we win, except we didn’t win that European Championship. Not if we’re truthful. Us, and the Netherlands, won it, just as us, and Germany, will win the World Cup if Tuchel delivers. To pretend otherwise is, well, quite xenophobic. Forget what is engraved on the trophy. What are we scared of, if failing to acknowledge our debt to a foreign nation’s system?

Wiegman did not need us to become a European champion because she had already done that, with her own country, in 2017. What we can say with certainty, however, is that England’s record in the competition showed we needed her. The same with the World Cup. She reached the final as Dutch manager in 2019. England had never got that far until she turned up. So, for England’s women, this has been an Anglo-Dutch collaboration, an Anglo-Dutch period of success, for which Bullingham wishes to credit some fictitious pathway of the FA’s creation.

As always, when the FA fails, panics and appoints a foreign manager, it tries to anglicise him for public consumption. Tuchel, we are told, is an Anglophile besotted by this country and its football culture. The same line was used about Sven-Goran Eriksson. It even tried it with Fabio Capello. And I’m sure Tuchel, like other managers who have worked here across many years such as Arsène Wenger, Pep Guardiola, Rafa Benítez or José Mourinho, must have found something about the place they enjoyed. Then again, I appreciate German expressionism and Kraftwerk, Can and Popol Vuh; I’ll argue Goethe’s significance beside Shakespeare; I love Berlin and the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder; I’ve watched the five-hour version of Das Boot straight; Reisling’s great; so is Schnitzel; my auntie Pat married a lovely German man and they live in Hanover. All of this makes me quite the Teutophile. Wouldn’t get me a position with the Germany national team, though. Wouldn’t get me through the door. The German federation has too great a sense of sporting identity for that.

The FA does not. That’s why it appoints a German, then keeps trying to tell us how English he is. Notice how much play Anthony Barry is getting? He’s Tuchel’s assistant and he’s a Liverpudlian. “One of the very best young English coaches,” Bullingham called him. What does he want, credit for getting an Englishman involved with the England team? Let’s see how much fanfare there is if, as expected, Tuchel appoints Hilario, who is Portuguese, as his goalkeeping coach.

Meanwhile, it’s painted as a triumph of negotiation that a man who was available on the day Gareth Southgate resigned as England manager — July 16, 2024 — can start work in January 2025. Actually, Bayern Munich’s statement about Tuchel said his working time at the club ended officially on June 30, 2024, so the FA could have begun talks with him on July 1, the day after England limped past Slovakia in Gelsenkirchen in the European Championship round of 16. Actually, scrap that. Bayern announced that Tuchel was done come the end of the season on February 21, 2024, so the sounding out in the event of Southgate’s departure could have taken place, discreetly, close to a year ago. Instead the FA is retrofitting a tale of ten interviews to its timeline in an attempt to prove that no stone went unturned. Yet one by one, supposed candidates from Eddie Howe to Graham Potter and Carlo Ancelotti claim they were not approached.

So here we are. It is now said that Tuchel won’t even start scouting English games until next year and most presume contractual or economic complications. An alternate view? What would be his first duty as manager if he walked into the job now? It would be the announcement of his squad for matches against Greece and Ireland on November 14 and 17. And when does that reveal traditionally take place? The Thursday before. In this case, November 7. See the complication? The FA has long been veterans of football’s poppy wars — we could argue they started them — and heaven forbid one of its employees is seen without one, when in season. And now they’re pushing a German manager out front four days before Remembrance Sunday? When Eriksson flew in from Rome to give his first press conference around this time in 2000 he appeared before the camera wearing a poppy too. I asked the then FA executive, David Davies, where a Swedish manager arriving from Italy had acquired it. “I’ll explain after,” he said. That was 25 years ago. Still waiting.

And Tuchel, decent man that he is, has been bending over backwards to accommodate the demands of his new role. He didn’t even rule out singing the anthem. But he shouldn’t, or at the very least Bullingham should intervene to save him the trouble. He’s not our performing seal. He shouldn’t try to fit in with us. If the FA wanted the PR schtick — the unicorns, the unity, the imaginary pathways — it should have been on the telephone to Howe and Newcastle United the moment it was known Southgate was leaving. Too complicated, too difficult.

So let’s make clear what this is: the desperate ploy of an organisation that has nothing to offer but money. Tuchel shouldn’t need to wear flowers, sing about God saving his king or buy into any of the ludicrous spin the FA advances to cover its shallowness. Just go out and be your own man, Thomas, be a German managing England. And if you do win it and are looking around the Metlife Stadium for someone to share a nationalist sing-song, I’ll make sure I know all the words to salute the victors. It’s still that one by Haydn, right?

Fifa should implement these rules on international football
I never like to identify a problem without advancing a solution, so here’s what Fifa’s rules on international management should be. First, there should be two categories: countries that must have a domestic incumbent and countries that remain unrestricted for development purposes. Limitations should apply not only to the manager but to the entire coaching staff, all those who have a direct effect on the team.

These are the countries that should not be allowed a foreign manager:

• Any nation that has won the World Cup
• Any nation that has been champion of its own continent
• Any nation that has spent the past ten years inside Fifa’s top 100

There will have to be judgment calls on whether Czechoslovakia conquering Europe in 1976 counts as both countries winning it, or neither, and how far back the count goes — Sudan were a force in African football half a century ago, for instance — but the basic principle should be that a country established enough to be a world or continental champion should be able to maintain a strong domestic football culture from that point. England, as World Cup winners in 1966 and never lower than 27th since rankings began, would be disqualified on two counts. That’s what makes this so embarrassing.

Anthems mean something – just ask Freddie Flintoff
A final point on the anthem. Under The Southern Cross I Stand is the victory song of the Australia cricket team. The story is told that after one Ashes Test the teams had got together for a drink, and Freddie Flintoff was the last Englishman remaining in the Australian dressing room. As his hosts prepared to start the singing, he stayed. “How does this one go?” he asked. He was ushered politely, but firmly, back to his own side. Some things aren’t for sharing, not even among friends. And where you’re from matters.

Click to expand...

Great article by Martin Samuel. It's really not rocket science but many don't seem to get it.

BarryfromEastenders · Oct 21, 2024

No more next manager discussion needed. Put it in the general thread from now on.