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Of the last 15 La Liga titles, nine were won by Spanish managers. In Italy, an Italian has managed the Serie A champions in 21 of the last 25 seasons, while 19 of the last 20 Ligue 1 titles have gone to clubs managed by Frenchmen. Even in Germany, where Pep Guardiola led a domineering Bayern Munich to three Bundesliga titles in a row, a German manager has topped the league 15 times in the last two decades.
Which makes the failure of an English manager to rise to the pinnacle of his own domestic league all the more startling. The last man to do so was Howard Wilkinson with Leeds way back in 1992, before the Premier League came into existence.
To put that in some context, there have been five British Prime Ministers, four US Presidents, three stock market crashes, 236 episodes of Friends and one hundred million grammatically incorrect tweets from Donald Trump (in his defense, it’s not easy to type with such small hands) since an Englishman last stood atop the English footballing pyramid.
So why is it that an English manager has never won the English Premier League? Glad you asked.
“Bloody Foreigners”
Ask a broad cross-section of English managers, pundits or former players why an Englishman has never won the Premier League and you’ll get a mostly uniform response: too many foreigners. Hell, even Jose Mourinho says so.
And, to an extent, they have a point. It’s a parochial, narrow-minded and borderline xenophobic point, but a point nonetheless.
The 2016-17 EPL sees just five of the league’s 20 teams managed by Englishmen, and none of those teams finished last season in the top half of the table. An Englishman hasn’t managed Chelsea since 1993, Arsenal since 1986, and Manchester United since 1985.
At Liverpool, an Englishman has been trusted to steer the ship for just four-and-a-half of the last 21 seasons. That’s a staggering dearth of home-grown managers at four of the country’s most storied and successful clubs.
But these clubs aren’t giving Englishmen the cold-shoulder for the sake of it. Alongside commercializing themselves to within an inch of their credibility, their primary focus is winning football matches, and to do that they appoint the best managers available to them.
With Premier League managers having access to riches beyond even The Clinton Foundation’s wildest dreams, they appoint the very best men from across the footballing world. And the cold, hard truth is that English managers, by-and-large, simply aren’t that good.
Not Enough English Coaches
And one of the primary reasons there aren’t very many good English managers is because there aren’t that many English coaches full stop. To be a top-flight football coach you have to hold UEFA’s Pro License, before which you need to complete the A License.A UEFA study from 2013 found that England had just 1,395 coaches holding Uefa’s A and Pro qualification badges, compared to France’s 3,308, Germany’s 6,934 and Spain’s 15,423.
With relatively few elite coaches to choose from, not least due to the $6,200 the English FA charges to take the A license course, it’s not wholly surprising that the top English teams don’t hire English managers.
But there was a time, in the Premier League’s infancy, when English managers, however poor, faced relatively little competition from those fancy chaps from the Continent. Indeed, the first EPL saw 18 of 22 clubs managed by England’s finest. Those 18 Englishmen, however, had someone closer to home to contend with.
One Angry Scotsman
From the Premier League’s “humble” beginnings in 1992 until his retirement in 2013, one man stood astride the EPL like John Wayne on a rocking horse, and he wasn’t English. More Scottish than the Loch Ness Monster eating a deep fried haggis, Sir Alex Ferguson led Manchester United to 12 Premier League titles in a 21-year period that saw the Red Devils swat aside rivals with gay abandon.
Fergie’s dominance was particularly damning for the English during the ‘90s; a time when “bloody foreigners” weren’t so prevalent in the EPL. His charges regularly demoted English managers such as Roy Evans (Liverpool) and Kevin Keegan (Newcastle) to the lesser placings, forcing the latter into a particularly epic on-air meltdown in 1997. Fergie won seven of the first nine Premier League titles, and it wasn’t until the introduction of Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho et al that he faced any real competition for the title.
There is a certain irony to the fact that the country which both codified the game and claims the “best league in the world” has fallen so desperately short when producing managers capable of winning it. With Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho, Jurgen Klopp, Antonio Conte, Mauricio Pochettino and, ahem, Arsene Wenger all at the helms of England’s leading clubs, it’s unlikely that will change any time soon.
