Thomas Tuchel is a symptom, not a cause, of English football’s coaching problems

There is one issue with England appointing Thomas Tuchel as Gareth Southgate’s successor — and it isn’t his nationality.

Rather, what does it say about English coaches — in number and quality — that Tuchel was the “outstanding candidate”?

The FA interviewed “approximately” 10 candidates for the senior men’s head coach role, including “some” English coaches.

However, none have a CV that can compete with Tuchel’s. He’s won 11 trophies in a 15-year career, including the top division in Germany and France and, most notably, the Champions League with Chelsea in 2021 — he was voted the world’s best club coach that year.

Tuchel has managed 67 Champions League matches, reaching the semi-finals four times. Only 17 managers ever have managed more, none of whom are English, and just four are currently in coaching roles: Carlo Ancelotti, Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho, and Louis van Gaal.

Even combining the experience of top English coaches, they don’t come close. Graham Potter (Chelsea), Eddie Howe (Newcastle), Frank Lampard (Chelsea) and Scott Parker (Club Bruges) have managed 31 Champions League matches combined. The quartet’s shared trophy cabinet contains only a Swedish Cup and an English Championship title.

“Clearly, you would love five to 10 domestic candidates who are coaching clubs in your domestic league, challenging and winning honours,” said FA CEO Mark Bullingham at Tuchel’s unveiling. “We are not quite in that place.”

Recent years have seen a real pathway established for players leaving England’s highest two tiers and starting management. Their routes are unique, but of the 43 coaches in England’s top four tiers who were born since 1980, 22 are English.

There is an ideal mix: members of the ‘golden generation’ of the 2000s (Michael Carrick, Wayne Rooney); players who had primarily EFL careers (Gary O’Neil, Russell Martin, Rob Edwards); those without professional playing backgrounds who found alternative routes, including being assistants (Kieran McKenna, Mark Bonner, Luke Williams, Liam Manning, Michael Skubala).

Those 10 have an average age of just under 40 — this won’t, or shouldn’t, be a piece in 10 years’ time. The English game has grown so rapidly since 2011 that it is too fast for English coaches to organically grow and develop their careers at the same rate.

As per UEFA’s report on the European club talent and competition landscape, in 2023-24, 25 per cent of Premier League clubs (five) had an English head coach. Across Europe’s other four major leagues: 82 per cent domestic coaches in Serie A; 81 per cent in La Liga; 63 per cent in the Bundesliga; 58 per cent in Ligue 1.

Likewise, the English Championship lags behind other second tiers. Last season, two-thirds of Championship clubs had an English coach. Ligue 2 was the next lowest, at 86 per cent of domestic coaches, up to Serie B with 95 per cent.

This is due to multiple factors. The cost and accessibility of UEFA ‘A’ and Pro Licenses is a common but only partial explanation — the frustrating paradox is that coaches cannot get on these courses without a professional role at a club, but need the qualification to get such a job.

The UEFA ‘A’ course costs £4,000 in England and the Pro License £13,700. Typically those courses are paid for by clubs, not individuals (partly because not many people have tens of thousands of pounds to spare).

The Championship has more overseas managers/head coaches than many other European second tiers (MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Even so, it is over twice as expensive to complete the Pro License in England than in Spain (€6,000). The costs in Germany have risen, too. However, there is an accessibility problem, with intakes skewed towards former professionals who are fast-tracked.

Last season, the same UEFA report showed that 83 per cent of Premier League coaches had professional playing experience in England’s top two tiers, higher than Europe’s other major leagues — the average is 68 per cent.

Courses in England are so oversubscribed that upcoming coaches, and former players, are going to other home nation FAs (Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) or to continental Europe because it is more affordable and their chances of getting on the course are better — even if it means learning another language.

The most recent publicly available numbers on coaching licenses are from 2017. Within that, England ranked sixth for combined UEFA ‘A’ and Pro Licenses. They were sandwiched between Turkey and Poland, while Germany had over twice as many and Spain over six times. One quirk is that Portugal had more Pro License coaches than UEFA ‘A’.

There has to be an acceptance that England has never really valued coaching for coaches. Go through the FA’s 2011-2015 or 2020-2024 strategic plans and there are no objective goals for licensing targets or coach education.

In the most recent plan, there were six “game-changer objectives”, long-term targets that the FA accepted would probably take over four years.

The focuses were developing the women’s game, creating 5,000 “quality” pitches, reaching over two million people on digital platforms, maximising the appeal and revenue of the cups, reducing discrimination and winning a major trophy.

The obsession with silverware is not new. In the 2011-2015 plan, launched at the time the Elite Player Performance Plan was implemented, coaching was not to develop coaches but a method of building winning teams: “England need better young players at every level. To produce better players, we need to train the coaches who will develop them”.

The application of this was loose, making the UEFA ‘B’ qualification a prerequisite for academy coaching roles, with a focus on “encouraging” coaches from all backgrounds to take their badges. It is hard to measure the effectiveness (or not) of the latter.

The only guidance for this was The FA’s Future Game technical guide, a trilogy of books packed with session plans designed to implement a playing philosophy which would develop better (and more) technical players and teams that could play through the thirds and press high.

It worked — sort of. England now have one of the deepest male talent pools of any nation. Yet, in some sense, they’ve overcorrected and there is a feeling within academies that the baby was thrown out with the bath water.

The long ball, physical style of Charles Reep, Charles Hughes and England teams of yesteryear has been all but tactically blacklisted.

The FA’s approach has encouraged coaches to be dogmatic more than adaptable and, consequently, England are stuck in a loop of cookie-cutter coaches who improve teams to a competitive level but struggle against the best opponents and in knockout competitions.

Everton head coach Sean Dyche emphasised this when asked about Tuchel’s appointment: “Each pathway doesn’t always lead to where you want it to. The idea was to get English coaches — and fast-track certain members if needs be — through the system and create that platform.

“But it’s changed so much, football management. All of us want to win, inevitably, and sometimes it gets lost in modern football. It’s almost like ‘But how are you going to do this, how are you going to do that?’. But what about winning?”

If the counter-argument to Tuchel is that every men’s World Cup has been won by a nation led by a coach from that country, then that is mitigated by the fact the Premier League is still waiting for its first win by an English head coach.

“I think it’s a reality of the modern game.”

Everton’s Sean Dyche says we need to ‘forget’ about nationalities, following Thomas Tuchel’s England appointment 🤝 pic.twitter.com/Tggc5oidj1

— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) October 17, 2024

The Premier League is now too good and too expensive to be a development league for coaches or players. Of the 96 teams across Europe’s top five leagues, the lowest-ranked English club for wage expenditure are Ipswich, in 49th.

That is a club who have had back-to-back promotions and are above Lille and Girona, two teams playing Champions League football. English clubs account for 15 of the top 30 European clubs for wage expenditure.

The financial incentives for staying in the Premier League, once promoted, are huge and there is greater accessibility to European competition than other leagues. Yet relegated teams are consistently going down with fewer points while title-winners are regularly finishing with 90+ points.

Arsenal have not had a British manager since 1996, Manchester City since 2007 (Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)

The five English head coaches in the Premier League last season accounted for four teams in the bottom seven. Eddie Howe’s Newcastle finished seventh, but there was Gary O’Neil’s Wolverhampton Wanderers next to Dyche’s Everton in 14th and 15th. Luton Town (Rob Edwards) and Sheffield United (Chris Wilder) were relegated.

O’Neil is the exception of the five in that he was hired directly by Wolves (after Julen Lopetegui left on the eve of the 2023-24 season). The other four all got either their current role or their first Premier League coaching role by being promoted from the Championship.

This inevitably creates a vicious circle where English coaches are associated with relegation-scrapping teams and, on the rare occasion that they do get a top job (like Potter at Chelsea), there is pressure to perform to prove that English coaches are at the required level.

There is a closed loop of experience, which English coaches don’t get, then they don’t get hired, and the cycle repeats. Considering UEFA have it that 87 per cent of head coaches start their career in their home nation, and 41 per cent at a former club, the problem is obvious.

One constant is clubs being prepared to take risks on former stars early in their coaching careers. Recent examples include Lampard at Chelsea and Everton, Gary Neville at Valencia, Steven Gerrard at Aston Villa (after three and a bit seasons at Rangers) and Wayne Rooney at Derby County, Birmingham City and now Plymouth Argyle.

But another part of the problem is that plenty of top coaches — Tuchel as a prime example — were very much not the best players and increasingly did not have professional careers. In England, the ability to ‘play the game’ has historically been the only proof of understanding it and the ability to coach it.

Tuchel is evidence of Germany being a more open-minded country in perceptions around coaching. He was hired by Augsburg without a Pro Licence and his playing career peaked at eight games in Germany’s second tier.

Julian Nagelsmann (Germany men’s head coach), Edin Terzic (formerly Borussia Dortmund) and Fabian Hurzeler (Brighton) are other examples of Germans with either no professional playing background or semi-professional experience who have reached the highest coaching levels.

In the UK, that requires a culture change, though it is starting to happen. Northern Ireland’s Kieran McKenna, at Ipswich, is the poster boy.

Julian Nagelsmann began coaching at the age of 20 (Peter Kneffel/picture alliance via Getty Images)

England needs more coaches to go abroad. There were multiple coaches of French, Spanish, German and Italian (either as first or second) nationality at Euro 2024, but Southgate was the only Englishman.

The UEFA report identified only 13 English coaches abroad in club or national team roles last season. Spain and Italy have 49 apiece, Portugal 35 and Germany 32.

England being disproportionately monolinguistic does not help and there is not an established culture of coaches going elsewhere to build their careers.

But it has to start somewhere.

Earlier this month, Will Still’s Lens drew 2-2 against Liam Rosenior’s Strasbourg. Before Still (who was born in Belgium to English parents) took over Reims in October 2022, England last had a head coach/manager in France’s top tier in the 1940s — now they have two.

🎙 | Un affrontement Still-Rosenior à l’accent britannique. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿👀 #RCSARCL pic.twitter.com/p1ZCSfXeX8

— DAZN France (@DAZN_FR) October 6, 2024

If successful, Still and Rosenior are much more likely to follow a Tuchel-style career path, beginning in their home country, going abroad and taking increasingly harder jobs, before returning home to manage one of the biggest clubs.

However, this is a slow process, one that takes decades and suffers more if it is rushed and coaches take jobs early and fail. Reputations are lost significantly faster than they are built.

English football has had an unprecedented decade of development. It needs time and a culture change for coaching to catch up. There are many things right with picking a foreign manager but a lot wrong with not having any comparable English coaches.

(Header design: Meech Robinson; Photos: Getty Images)