Appointing Tuchel isn't a 'dark day' for England - but it reflects the worrying truth about English coaching

It is, according to The Daily Mail, “a dark day for England”. Has the pound crashed, or some worthy public figure passed away? Did some terrible tragedy occur which claimed innocent lives? No, it’s something worse still, at least as far as that particularly rotten rag is concerned – England are appointing Thomas Tuchel as their new men’s head coach.

He’s an experienced and hugely successful Champions League-winning manager noted for his tactical acuity, of course, but he is also – and here’s the sticking point for people whose heads are lodged in a semi-fictionalised version of 1945 – German. Some might see the appointment of a German head coach as a sign of how far we’ve come as a nation, a pronounced step away from the jingoism of a less enlightened era. Others will see it as a national desecration. Those people are wrong.

Some England supporters will inevitably be averse to Tuchel’s appointment on strictly xenophobic grounds, and they will no doubt be joined in their antipathy by the usual right-wing grifters on social media, including the ones who couldn’t name the England squad at gunpoint. In this polarised age of extreme, nuance-free opinions, such people are barely worth arguing with. They will fume and bloviate, just as they did when Lee Carsley opted not to sing God Save The King in Dublin last month, but to pick a fight with them is a waste of perfectly good energy. Most such people will have opinions so trenchant that you wouldn’t be able to dig them out with a shovel.

Such foolishness will, however, detract from (and shout over) the rather more reasoned debates available - not only about whether the nationality of a country’s coach really matters, but also whether Tuchel’s appointment represents a condemnation of coaching standards and development in England. This is, after all, a country which produces an enormous number of footballers and coaches – so how come we are at a point when there are so few serious candidates for the job who come from this country?

Unless you wanted to reach a little bit, there were only ever three English managers with the credentials and cachet to take the top job: Eddie Howe, who would have been a popular and entirely reasonable choice; Graham Potter, whose struggles at Chelsea and habit of taking time to get going at clubs made his candidacy harder to sell; and Carsley himself, who came through the England system and will presumably now return to manage the Under-21s. And yes, Carsley is English. He just happens to also be Irish. Neither one invalidates the other.

For a long time now, top Premier League clubs have all but refused point blank to appoint English managers. Of the established sides who have been in regular contention for silverware, only Chelsea have appointed a permanent English manager in the last decade. One, Frank Lampard, probably wouldn’t have been given the chance if he hadn’t been a club legend as a player. The other, Potter, had to ship out to Sweden to earn his coaching stripes.

Partly, this is the consequence of English football’s ingrained notion that other countries do it better. A national inferiority complex, fostered through decades of failure on the international sporting stage, means that it is simply assumed that an Italian or Spanish head coach will be smarter than and superior to his Anglo-Saxon peers. We exoticize foreign managers, players, even referees, assuming the Premier League’s to be the worst in the world – even though they are, believe it or not, among the very best.

When footballers or coaches or officials are plying their trade abroad, we don’t see the warts and blemishes and occasional ricks. We thought Pierluigi Collina was the greatest referee of all time, even though he made just as many mistakes as others in his trade in Serie A. We saw a lot of fans clamouring for Fikayo Tomori’s inclusion in the England squad for years because they never really watched him play. In other words, we romanticise what we don’t see week in, week out. A natural tendency, perhaps, but those crusty old jokes about how Big Sam’s career would have gone had he been born Samuele Allardici actually hold a fair amount of weight.

Plenty of English coaches are given a chance in the EFL, of course, but no matter how much they succeed, the biggest teams, the ones with the wealth to compete for trophies, almost never dare risk appointing one. They are rarely given the chance to show what they could do with the colossal transfer budgets and clashing egos of top-tier clubs.

Perhaps to pin that entirely on our national habit of doing ourselves down while building other countries’ football up in our minds isn’t entirely fair – there’s a perfectly valid question to be asked about whether our coaches are given the kind of training and development they need to match their foreign peers.

Back in 2010, The Guardian ran a story which discovered that less than 3,000 football coaches in England held UEFA Pro, A or B licenses, the top three tiers of continental coaching credentials – by comparison, Spain had around 24,000 such qualified coaches, Italy almost 30,000 and Germany nearly 35,000.

Since the opening of St. George’s Park an effort has been made to play catch-up with a pledge to train 250,000 new coaches (not necessarily to the top level), but it’s not fully clear how much ground has been made up. Research from Statista in 2017 still showed England lagging miles behind other nations in terms of volume of Pro and A-licensed coaches. Austria, Poland and Turkey all had more of the latter.

So there is almost certainly a significant talent deficit as well, and even if programmes run over the intervening years have closed the gap successfully it may well be a few more years before those new coaches have the experience to earn big management gigs. In other words, while The FA should work to address the fact that big clubs are terrified of English coaches, there is also evidence that English coaching as a whole really does lag well behind.

Based on that, it’s hard not to see the appointment of a German head coach as a logical end point to English football’s recent development. We have an incredibly multicultural league structure in which players of all nationalities and backgrounds thrive. We have also failed to turn talent into top-level coaches on a national level. As a result, the taboo against foreign managers has rightly broken down over time and the need for one has arguably become quite acute, especially if none of the English options were either available or convincing to The FA.

Besides, it’s not like we haven’t been here before. Eyebrows were certainly raised when the late Sven-Göran Eriksson was appointed but he became wildly popular very quickly. Fabio Capello earned less fans or plaudits but few were upset by his initial appointment. Certainly, when Dutchwoman Sarina Wiegman won the European Championship with England’s women, nobody seemed to curb their celebrations as a result.

And yes, Tuchel being German requires another old taboo to be broken, another ingrained prejudice to be overcome. We have a rivalry with Germany based mostly on two World Wars, both long past, and a few scarring defeats in major tournaments. In other words, a rivalry based on old news, one that doesn’t really serve much modern purpose.

In any case, it’s been 310 years since George I of Hanover became the first German King of England – and if we, the general public of this nation, can handle three centuries of German monarchs without complaint, then we should probably be able to cope with a German England manager too. If only The Daily Mail could.