The last English men’s football manager to lift a trophy above his head at Wembley was Harry Redknapp, when he won the FA Cup with Portsmouth in 2008. Until yesterday – when Eddie Howe’s Newcastle beat Liverpool to take the Carabao Cup.
Howe “pulled off something truly stunning”, and the reverberations of his astonishing tenure at St James’ Park will “echo through history”, said Luke Edwards in The Telegraph. But the Buckinghamshire-born manager’s triumph has once again turned attention towards a baffling question: where have all English football’s “home-grown” managers gone?
‘The best, no matter where they’re from’
Eddie Howe is one of only two English managers in Premier League football, alongside Graham Potter at West Ham – although former Northern Ireland youth player Kieran McKenna, who coaches Ipswich, was born in England, and Everton are managed by Scottish-born David Moyes.
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The Premier League “is not really an English league but a global league that happens to be in England”, said Miguel Delaney in The Independent. The “ownership of the clubs is international” and, just as the players are now drawn from all over the world, so are the managers because the owners “want the best coaches, no matter where they’re from”.
The failure of top-drawer English players to evolve into the next generation of managers is also significant, said Ben Littlemore on Transfermarkt. With former players like Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard all turning their hand to management, England “should really be blessed” with home-grown managers. But this so-called “golden generation” of coaches has “struggled for success”.
English football’s “coaching incentives and methods” are behind those of their European counterparts”. Even at the entry level, coaching qualifications are far more expensive in the UK than they are on the continent, and only available through a “handful” of hugely-oversubscribed courses, meaning that European countries have a much, much bigger pool of qualified coaches to draw from.
‘Poster boy for success’
There is a “glaring absence of elite native coaches coming through” the English system, said The Standard. And that couldn’t have been underlined more than by the recent appointment of German coach Thomas Tuchel to manage England’s national side.
The “infatuation with foreign coaches” and a refusal to give a chance to “so many good ones of our own” is difficult to understand, said Harry Redknapp in The Sun. And now we’re in a “catch-22 classic”, said the Daily Mail: the perception that English managers “don’t win major trophies” means they don’t secure the best jobs, and “without the best jobs, it’s impossible to win major trophies”.
But perhaps the weekend’s Newcastle victory is the moment the tide starts to turn. In a Premier League “flooded with more fashionable foreign coaches”, home-grown Eddie Howe has now become the “poster boy for success”, said Edwards in The Telegraph.
