Steve Cooper is said to have been left stunned by his Leicester sacking, with Graham Potter a likely contender to replace him at the King Power Stadium. (Daily Telegraph)
If he doesn't go before, I think Howe almost certainly goes at the end of the season unless he does something really impressive this season. Newcastle's new director seems to want go go in a different direction. There's a very real scenario where all of Howe, Dyche and O'Neil either get sacked or are relegated, and next season starts with either Chris Wilder or Scott Parker (or both) as the only English manager(s) in the whole league. Parker I don't think would last until Christmas in that scenario. It's very grim times for English managers at club level.
It's probably likely at this rate. There's a chance it happens next season if you factor in the likelihood of potential mid-season sackings.
I think that would bring about a lot of headlines but it’s hard to see how much can be changed. Reducing the cost of training could have an impact but not for quite a few years.
It's really tough to change when you have a football culture that disincentives risk so much - it's just the perils of having such a wealthy league. Same reason most managers take fewer risks with their playing style when they get a job in the Premier League and largely just use the template that Pep has set. I've always maintained that we need the PL's wealth in order to produce top players because of how much our national game is lacking from the roots up - and I still think that's pretty much true - but I think we're starting to see signs of the club game in England eating itself at the top level because of the exorbitant wealth.
English managers need to start going abroad if they want to get to the PL via any other route than taking a promoted club up - but it's a massive step to do so and you'd need to go young and get into the systems there in the main and then you end up as not really an English coach anyway - if that makes sense. e.g. the only thing English about Will Still is that he sounds English when he speaks, and his nationality is English - to all intents and purposes he is a foreign coach.
Cost of training isn’t the issue at the top level really, it’s the lack of pathway and the fact that basically every coach in Europe can speak English and is therefore a viable candidate, something that isn't any issue in other counties. Also money is basically not an obstacle in hiring anyone from abroad.
Cleverley and Carrick are currently in the Championship playoff places. It's good that Middlesborough have stuck with Carrick, hopefully he can get them promoted.
There is also an issue with how difficult it is for aspiring coaches to get a place on the A & Pro Licence courses here. It sounds like a nightmare for people who don't have a fairly extensive playing background in English football. Cleverley is doing a really good job at Watford, they're overperforming massively. They won't go up but they could've easily been in a relegation battle this season with that squad. Same with John Eustace at Blackburn - the squad is probably in the bottom 25% of the league in terms of quality but if our game at home to Portsmouth didn't get called off last weekend and we'd have won it, we'd currently be 5th.
Practically the only top English coaches now a days coming through are ex pro’s or those who have other strong long term links to top clubs and got in that way. There need to be more variety in pathways
Struggling Luton would have to pay as much as £1.5m to sack manager Rob Edwards because of the four-year deal he signed in the summer. (Sun), external
Costs of licenses and training is an issue, but the main reason why there is a significant lack of PL coaches is the lack of upward mobility, the larger clubs will very rarely look inside the English pyramid for managerial solutions, when they can just pick a guy from Portugal/Netherlands/Germany with top level experience already (who almost certainly speaks the language).
Maybe the situation wouldn't be so bad if the FA didn't appoint Sven-Goran Eriksson as the first ever foreign England manager. Looking back at the 2001-02 season, there were 10 English managers, 5 Scottish managers, 1 Irish manager and 4 foreign managers.
And John Gregory was the highest ranked England manager at 6th the season prior to Eriksson joining....England's lack of managerial talent isn't a new thing. Even when Eriksson joined it had been 10 years since an England manager had won the first division - and in that 10 years Joe Royle was the only English manager to win an FA cup either. England clearly has, and has had for a long, long time big issues in being able to produce top coaches. I mean which coaches who started their career in the 80s or 90s were respected internationally? It all long predates Eriksson's appointment. This is a real issue for England. The FA certainly shoulders some responsibility for not fostering better coaches, but its not the kind of thing that is going to be quickly fixed by the nationality of the manager of the national team. Even then I suspect the truth is it lies beyond the FA. A large part of it is cultural (English football doesn't seem to produce many managers who are thinkers, and almost no innovators), some of it is probably poor coaching of coaches, some of it is probably lack of opportunity. None of it is whether or not an Englishman took charge in 2001.
There's definitely a big cultural aspect to it. We've had this conversation on here before and I remember it being quite divisive. There are definitely what we'd call "thinkers" around in English football, but they're never given the opportunity to rise to the top, whether that's in coaching or the media. Both are just riddled with ex-pros who either feel too entitled to deepen their own knowledge or simply aren't capable, so it creates a football culture that's devoid of that kind of deep thought. Football is like every other aspect of British society in that it's riddled with nepotism and elitism. That in itself is always a massive barrier to any sort of progressive change or innovation.
Britain is a leader in many innovative areas like science, engineering and technology. DeepMind is one of the most innovative companies in any sector in any country of recent times, for example. The problem is that it got hoovered up by Google.
Graham Potter has fallen foul of this. Fans looking down their noses at him. If he were Dutch or Portuguese I don't think he'd be seen in the same light.
Well now the general thinking in this country is that foreign managers are better than English managers. Which means that English managers don't get jobs in the Premier League. And maybe that thinking started in 2001 when the FA made an unprecedented appointment.
But that thinking is far more earned by poor performance of English managers over many years, not an appointment the FA made in 2001. As you point out when Eriksson was hired the majority of the English managers in the league were English - yet the best placed had been 6th the previous season. Between 1987-2001 there was one year an English manager won the league. In the same period three Scottish managers. The bad reputation didn't come out of nowhere. In FA cup the only managers between 1988-2001 were Venables and Royle, two of 13 year attempts. You have the causality the wrong way round, the FA made the unprecedented appointment because the English managers were not achieving anything, the FA didn't cause English managers to stop getting jobs, poor performance going back to the 80s did. I don't think its really possible to make wider societal declarations on sport. The most highly ranked European countries for innovation are Denmark, Sweden and Finland who all play extremely functional and limited imagination football, while Spain and Italy have excellent reputations for football managers but score poorly for basically any society innovation index and have very little world leading output.
Even if English managers were performing poorly since the 90s, they were still getting jobs. But now they don't even get the jobs. I just think that the FA looking abroad for the England manager could've encouraged the clubs to do the same.