LET’S START WITH the latest corporate efficiency news from Manchester United PLC, who have ended Alex Ferguson’s two-million-quid-a-year ambassadorial role.
This latest act of cost-cutting has been met with outrage from some United luminaries, with Eric Cantona calling it “scandalous” before saying he would throw Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos into a “big bag of shit”.
Rio Ferdinand reacted as if the Godfather had just been whacked. “If Sir Alex can be taken out, then NO ONE IS SAFE – anyone can get it now.” Erik ten Hag might have awoken this morning beside a horse’s head.
This column finds it hard to argue with Ineos’s decision. Ferguson was making more than two million pounds a year simply for sitting glumly above the team’s latest shambles, like a reverse Dorian Gray: a clean portrait of how things once were beside a present image growing increasingly decrepit and hideous.
Plus, much of the hysteria around United is baked in the shadow of the old empire, so any decisions that shrink that pall of unrealistic comparison is a good thing.
But this decision does mark the passing of time at Old Trafford and in the English game in general. Ferguson is the last archetype of the great managers who dominated British football from the 1960s, following a lineage of Stein, Busby, and Shankly. All were bound by obvious traits: they were all Scottish and domineering, bringing to their jobs a working-class cocktail of hard work, ruthlessness, pragmatism, romanticism and a rock-solid belief in the infallibility of their intuition.
Nowadays the great managers are not really managers at all, but instead are hyper-detailed and obsessive coaches who govern in coalition with other club executives rather than rule alone. They chew over complex tactical conundrums rather than gum, and rather than wear suits they turn up for work in slacks, tight-fitting jumpers and occasionally without socks.
There is one common thread that links Ferguson and his predecessors and those who came after him, however. None of them are English.
It’s a remarkable fact, really, the fact England produces so few coaches and managers who work at the highest level. No English manager has ever won the Premier League, and there have been as many Chilean title-winners as English winners of England’s top flight since 1987.
That England do not produce elite-level managers has been thrown into stark relief this week by the other big football news of the week, the appointment of Thomas Tuchel as England manager.
Tuchel is one of the best coaches of his generation and perhaps the best at one-off knockout ties, which makes him a superb candidate for England and patently strengthens their chances of winning the next World Cup. Yet swathes of the English press have reacted to his appointment with hostility. The Daily Mail have predictably jackknifed from ‘We can’t have this woke Englishman in charge’ to ‘We can’t have this German in charge’, via the brief interregnum of ‘We can’t have this Irishman in charge.’
You can scoff at the Mail’s xenophobia and eternal war nostalgia, but their objections are relevant given a chunk of the England support still treat their team as an ersatz travelling army and sing about 10 German bombers.
The more thoughtful criticism of Tuchel’s appointment in the broadsheets is that hiring an outside coach undermines the whole point of international football, and the principle of ‘the best of ours against the best of yours’.
Tuchel is not English but he is an expression of present English football culture which is essentially: let’s use all this money we have to hire the best there is.
After England’s abject failure to qualify for Euro 2008, Premier League clubs effectively took over elite player production, swelling academies to supply their first-teams with either cheap local talent or liquid capital to buy expensive foreign talent. This has yielded an astonishing array and depth of quality to England’s current squad, all of whom have the technical skills that were hitherto deemed unimaginable by English pundits and journalists.
St George’s Park and the FA did plenty right in terms of integrating this talent in underage and senior teams, but the vast bulk of players’ development and coaching was paid for by the Premier League clubs, whose wealth derives from England’s open arms and blind eye towards money, regardless of its origin.
This England team owes much to good coaching greatly influenced by the spread of ideas from Spain and Holland, but none of it would have been possible without the wealth of nation states, oligarchs, hedge funds, professional gamblers, and assorted other club owners.
So when you see brilliant English players, know that their development owes much to foreign capital. In that context, it is hard to argue a foreign England manager is some awful violation of the natural order of things.
Other nations without access to such wealth have been forced to work with ideas instead, but England hasn’t really had to worry about this.
It could shed its outdated ideology and work with what came to them. In a neat change, England itself became the Position of Maximum Opportunity: the money and level of competition is what has attracted the world’s best coaches to the Premier League, and the same has drawn Thomas Tuchel to the England job.
If Ferguson’s demotion is another reminder that English football is no longer ruled by an iron fist, Tuchel’s appointment affirms the fact it’s now guided by the invisible hand.
