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Are these Sunderland and former Spurs managers leading candidates for England?
As a Premier League season likely to be dominated by an impressive crop of dictatorial managers draws ever nearer, the list of names to replace departing England manager Roy Hodgson looks distinctly uninspiring. The contrast could hardly be more stark.
There seems to be an emerging consensus that the next manager should be an Englishman. In an ideal world, international football should be based on ‘the best of ours against the best of yours’, and that goes for coaching as well as the playing squad. Bolstering your resources with expensive acquisitions from elsewhere should be left to club football.
Yet, this isn’t an ideal world, and with a dearth of convincing domestic candidates, the FA may be forced to consider a foreign manager. Over the next few pages, we have considered the five managers who are at the front of the betting market. Let us know your thoughts on the selection in the comments below.
Sam Allardyce
Allardyce is a well-balanced candidate because he has a chip on both shoulders. His ‘if my name were Sam Allardici’ posturing was repellent and soaked in paranoia. The idea that British managers are conspired against by an elite that prefers ‘sexy’ foreign managers, says more about our own manager’s insecurities than it does about continental coaches.
In the interests of fairness however, those who have worked with and played under Allardyce, praise his wide and varied coaching methods. Indeed, he
was one of the first British coaches to embrace sports science and analytics tools such as ProZone.
If the EU referendum revealed a cultural schism in Britain, nothing separates the sheep from the goats in footballing circles like a discussion about analytics. Those who express scepticism about its utility are branded ‘dinosaurs’, while those who are devout believers in numbers are labelled ‘hipsters’. Allardyce has shown he can deftly synthesise both approaches.
He led Bolton Wanderers into the Premier League, kept them there and even brought European football to the Reebok Stadium. He kept Blackburn Rovers up and has just repeated the trick at Sunderland.
One concern must be that he has yet to manager a team who is expected to win a majority of their games. A possible exception was his ill-fated spell at Newcastle United. When you coach a perceived ‘underdog’, more often than not you are not expected to take the initiative in matches.
Instead, you base your success around reactive football, primarily focused on stopping your opponents and then capitalising on their weaknesses with sucker-punches. All of which is admirable, but could Allardyce adapt and coach a team who are heavy favourites for almost all their games? England struggled to break down deep lying defences in Euro 2016, and this is not a problem Allardyce has ever had to consider.