Reply With QuoteI think Warnock would be judged purely on what he has acheived as a manager. No EPL team would touch him based on that.
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Another great article by Jon Nicholson here. He says a lot of clubs avoided managers like Allardyce because of how backwards he came across, would Warnock have been held back (rightly or wrongly) for similar reasons?
The Premier League’s ‘second-class’ citizens are on the rise
There’s a success story in the Premier League that is quietly revolutionary. Perhaps almost without it being talked about, it now has nine clubs managed by British men: eight English and one Northern Irish. And almost every one of them is rather good. While Roy Hodgson and Steve Bruce are very much old stagers, the other seven are spoken of very highly, from Dean Smith to Graham Potter, to Chris Wilder, Sean Dyche, Brendan, Eddie Howe and of course Frank Lampard. Not a bad septet.
How times have changed. But why? For a while it seemed like thoughtful, progressive English managers were a dying breed, so what has brought about this renaissance? You might be shocked to learn it is a lot to do with Sam Allardyce.
When, with all the self-awareness, grace and charm of an incontinent rhino in a lingerie store, Allardyce suggested a couple of years ago that British coaches were “almost deemed as second class” in England during a television interview – somewhat inevitably with Richard Keys and Andy Gray on beIN Sports – adding that British coaches “have nowhere to go” and “the Premier League is a foreign league in England” many of us put our head in our hands and groaned at such a dreadful chippy Little Englander mentality, a mentality at odds with the facts, as much as at odds with the modern world of football, indeed the modern world, period.
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This all followed on from the infamous Paul Merson and Phil Thompson evisceration of Marco Silva’s appointment at Hull earlier that year, which I won’t go over again, but which seemed to have its roots in the same poisonous waters. And they were not the only ones by a long way, nor were these the only instances of claims that ‘the foreign lads’ got jobs over and above ‘good, young, English managers’ as the cliche goes, but Allardyce and those who orbited him were the leading propagandists for this view.
Wouldn’t it be awful if there was some truth in what he and they said? Wouldn’t it be awful if English coaches had actually been held back and discriminated against when it came to getting top-flight jobs? Surely Allardyce and his army of reactionary non-thinkers weren’t right all along?
Well some think he absolutely was.
For additional exclusive content which will be available later this year as an addendum to my new book, Can We Have Our Football Back?, I talked to people who have worked in the game over the last decade or more and was told executives at some clubs absolutely were put off employing English managers. Why? Because of Allardyce and his buddies in the media. One put it to me this way.
“Allardyce and a few other high-profile people and newspapers talked such rubbish for so long that they spoiled the British manager brand with some potential employers. I have no doubt about that. Some execs, especially from abroad, thought English managers were all likely to be at least a bit like him with that weird small-islander mentality and full of entitlement and bragging. They seemed narrow-minded and out-of-date. They were totally put off and went for non-British coaches instead because they seemed more progressive, intelligent and open-minded. They were prepared to work in different countries and absorb different cultures and thinking. Allardyce and those who thought like him, weren’t. One used to refer to them as ‘the Dad’s Army crowd’. That’s what they seemed like: something from the past.
“On the other hand, there were also those at some clubs who thought like him – sometimes, but not always, clubs with English owners – and for a while would appoint managers largely because of their British nationality. I vividly remember the attitude among the hierarchy of my club when Sherwood first got the Spurs job and then Villa. They were wide-eyed in disbelief. It became iconic of what not to do. He became iconic of a terrible appointment made on wholly the wrong basis.
“For a long time, the worst, most narrow, jingoistic pundits also made getting a job for an English coach both much harder for some, but much easier for others. The situation they all moaned about did exist to a degree but it existed because they created it! Two things ran in parallel: both over-rewarding and discrimination of British managers.”
However, this seems to be less and less the case today with only 22 managers of the current 91 English Football League clubs not British or Irish by nationality and only one of 42 in Scotland.
When I raised this with another interviewee, he said this was precisely because of the declining influence of the old guard and the upgrading of the punditocracy.
“All those old voices are a bit…kind of toxic, I suppose. You flinch when you hear them, don’t you? Not that many would openly say that. OK, they’re still out there and Allardyce is on talkSPORT sometimes, but he just sounds like someone who is being employed to say something controversial. He’s like a football Farage, isn’t he? He’s such a downmarket brand and increasingly irrelevant. That’s my view anyway, and I’m not alone in that.
“Things have totally moved on. Look at how someone like Ian Holloway was recently mocked for his Brexit views. He’s actually a very nice man but clubs want a Danny Cowley or an Eddie Howe, not Ian or Harry Redknapp or even David Moyes and that’s exactly why we’re seeing better coaches getting better jobs and doing better. The cloud that the old coterie of moaner has lifted. OK, Roy is still at Palace but he was never an Allardyce type. He’s sophisticated and intelligent and doing a half-decent job. That just leaves Brucey, who is only there due to the unique situation at Newcastle, bless ‘im.”
Another ex-club official told me:
“There’s absolutely no way Sherwood would get the Spurs job now. Even saying that seems totally ridiculous, doesn’t it? Sherwood! I mean, bloody hell. What was all that about? No way Mark Hughes would get a top-flight job now. Same goes for Alan Pardew and all the other boring Brits that used to be on the merry-go-round. That’s how much things have changed in the last couple of years. On TV you’ve got clever hard-working, articulate people like Danny Higginbotham and Andy Hinchcliffe setting new standards of analysis, so it’s natural that club owners want coaches who can speak as well as they do about the game. The pundits that just turn up and wing it on the basis of their playing career giving their views validation are few and far between now. A whole new more intelligent atmosphere has been created. Contrast those two pundits to Merson’s advice to Manchester United last week, which was simply to improve by buy loads of great players! [laughs]
“But you see, once upon a time, he’d have got away with that, now he’s either laughed at for it, or simply ignored. It’s symbolic of the upgrading of football culture I believe and that’s finally allowed excellent British managers to get good jobs without a club worrying about them saying childish things such as they’d be respected more if they had a foreign name. No-one ever worried Graham Potter would be anything like Allardyce. Same for Dean Smith. These are men cut from different cloth.”
Someone else who worked in the game until recently in an administrative capacity and now works in an agency told me:
“Imagine if Lampard went into Chelsea talking like Allardyce used to, with his attitudes. You can’t, can you? It’s my view that someone like Chris Wilder, who is hardly a flash in the pan, who has been very good for a while now, was held back from a bigger club taking a chance on him because unless you know him, you might think was another old-fashioned thick-necked English gobshite coach like Allardyce, which he isn’t at all. Those people were a drag on the game in this country for far too long. If you want more proof, look at how well England have done with Gareth Southgate in charge. He’s the opposite of everything those people are and it’s no coincidence that England have been better under his leadership. What you might call the Allardyce mentality had so much sway for so long, so much sway that they gave him the bloody England job! That seems almost surreal now, doesn’t it? He could still be doing the job, in fact. That’s unthinkable, isn’t it? That hows you how far we’ve come.”
Several times I’ve been told that the British football world is like school, with all the petty jealousies, fights, bullying, ganging up and fleeting friendships that we all grew up with. That’s why they won’t speak on the record about it. They don’t want to metaphorically – or perhaps literally – get beaten up behind the bike sheds for slagging off one of the rough boys. You can understand that.
So if you were British and got a job you weren’t qualified for, it seems you can thank Allardyce et al., and if you didn’t get a job you were qualified for, you can blame him. Either way, quietly but profoundly, it seems the culture of English football on and off the pitch has changed massively in recent years and thank god for that. It is so much better for it.
I think Warnock would be judged purely on what he has acheived as a manager. No EPL team would touch him based on that.
Would Warnock have been held back because of the likes of Allardyce???
He is the championship version of Allardyce and pretty much every negative described in that article.
Before he got the job with us he moaned about getting overlooked for jobs because Championship clubs were going down the foreign route.
He actually named Nottingham Forest as a team he wanted to put one over on as they’d employed a foreign nobody instead of giving him the job.
His comments last season on Brexit. His comments the season before about Nuno and how we “behave in a certain way in this country”
He’s the biggest Little Englander if the lot.
Was he held back? Jesus wept.
Not sure if this is a woosh attempt??
Really good article that. Where is it from?
I’m no Allardyce fan but it seems to be overlooking the great job he did at Bolton, getting them into Europe and employing the likes of Dugarry, Campo and Jay jay Okacha. I’m sure he was credited at the time for his revolutionary use of video analysis, diet plans etc - but guess that doesn’t fit in with the current stereotyping of him
If you think back to Sam Allardyce in his pomp at Bolton, signing players aged 30 and upwards and getting the best of them by being one of the few managers to really buy into sports science, and the idea that he could be seen as "yesterdays man" is rather surprising. Similarly, it's only a couple of years ago that Stoke had three seasons on the bounce finishing 9th in the premier league, getting the best out of Bojan etc., and yet Mark Hughes is likely to struggle to get his next job at that level. Either the game has moved exceptionally quick within the past few years, and/or these managers have become lazy in developing their ideas, or pundits have become lazy in how they describe this lot of UK managers because anything other than a black and white story is hard to write.
But Sherwood has done the same coaching course as Chris Wilder who is praised within this article?There’s absolutely no way Sherwood would get the Spurs job now.
Who has been served well by good youth coaches at club level and England international level, influence of Klopp, Pep and Cooper, who have ensured that these are the most technically gifted English players for ages. It's also a system that has stolen, as they should, an awful lot of what the FAW has done so well to create the right environment for players to produce their best and a huge amount of investment - has any team invested as much as the English FA into football since 1966? - that means it's hard to quantify how much of their recent success is really down to Southgate.If you want more proof, look at how well England have done with Gareth Southgate in charge.
It just seems like lazy punditry to not reflect on that there are a huge number of shared circumstances between UK managers and that sometimes managers will become successful just because they are given the right opportunity while others will miss out on success because they aren't trusted with anything but the wrong opportunities.
Well worth reading. I agree with most of it, but I'm not convinced that all the traditional British managers are just clones of Big Sam.
In some cases they have more depth, flexibility and innovation than they're given credit for.
Neil Warnock? Somewhere in between Allardyce and 'modern managers'.
Nicholson writes for football365.comOriginally Posted by thehumblegringo
Held back is the wrong phrase, I mean has he got the jobs he has because of the same reasons as Allardyce ?
I would say its a bit of both. Theres no doubt hes very good at playing the media but at Championship level hes got the record to back it up so its not like hes under performed and still got jobs.
By the same token there is absolutely no doubt in my mind because of his personality some foreign owners would be put off by him.
I disagree with Jon 1959. I would say Allardyce is somewhere in between Warnock and the modern manager rather than the other way around. He was one of the first British managers to embrace the sports science side.
Allardyce has also operated at higher level, for far longer than Warnock ever did. He also did what it said on the tin and could keep teams up. Yeah he likes to champion himself, a lot of managers do, Warnock certainly does, but he could also back it up by meeting his remit in most jobs.
Some of the managers mentioned in that article, whilst they are young and have nice fresh ideas, they havent proven anything yet, certainly not at the top level.
Allardyce left Bolton 12 years ago.
Yes he embraced some modern ideas at the start of his career, but has failed to adapt in the last decade, when we have seen a big change in UK football.
He was on talkshite yesterday talking about teams playing out from the back and clearly demonstrated he had absolutely no idea why teams are doing it.
He obviously hasn't even tried to understand, just disregarded it as silly nonsense brought in by foreigners.
He's not a stupid guy, he absolutely could understand it if he made the effort, but he's not going to change now, but football has changed and he has been somewhat left behind.
I was gonna write something similar when I had time today
I disagree that hes failed to adapt in the last decade. In the last decade he won promotion with West Ham, got them established again, and keeping Sunderland up was nothing short of a miracle. He also did what was required to keep Palace up, and needed to drag an Everton in free fall out of the mire. So up until he got sacked by Everton recently you could argue his methods still worked for the clubs he was managing. His methods arent going to work for clubs who want to challenge but they certainly worked as far as keeping teams safe.
Theres also an argument that if you havent got the players good enough to play out from the back then why do it? Arsenal were awful at Watford and clearly not comfortable with it. Getting caught in posession loads of times, lost goals because of it, so I can also see where hes coming from.
As much as id like to see City play more football I dread to think what would happen if Peltier received the ball in our own box from a goal kick and tried to play out.
Theres managers with worse CVs than Big Sam who were lucky to stay on the merry go around as long as they did so I dont know why he cops it more than anyonelse. Alan Pardew for one.
I'm not saying he isn't good at what he does, but his style of play is becoming less and less successful, even in the championship.
He'd still do a job at a number of clubs for a few years, but to bring him in somewhere would be going against the tide that everyone else is going.
I.e. a special individual like Warnock can make it work in the championship when almost nobody else can any more, but where does it leave us when he goes?
It's funny how quickly things changed for the group of older managers who clubs invariably seemed to turn to when there was a vacancy. Obviously, Alan Pardew's dreadful spell at West Brom and Mark Hughes' at Southampton were huge blows to their profile, but, unlike the Allardyce, Pulis and Warnock school of managers, I thought the two of them could sometimes produce vibrant, attacking teams that supporters got right behind.
You've got to say with Allardyce that he probably hasn't conspicuously failed in any of his jobs - when he has hit trouble, it's tended to come from supporters at clubs which demand more than a "traditional" Allardyce approach (e.g. Newcastle, West Ham and Everton). I would also say that, rightly or wrongly, Allardyce especially has always had that stigma that he was a bit "dodgy" hanging around him.
The fact is that the style of football associated with Allardyce, Pulis and Warnock is what you could call firefighting - sides turn to them when they are in trouble and you have to accept that they all have good records when it comes to avoiding relegation except for Warnock in the Premier League. All three of them have also got the promotions behind them to show that they can bring some degree of success to clubs, but I think that it's increasingly in the nature of supporters to want more than just being established at a higher level. They want to see progression from firefighting football and I believe there are parallels between Pulis at Middlesbrough and Warnock here in that parachute payments meant that they could have gone for something more expansive and didn't - Pulis was expected to get at least a top six finish last season and when his boring brand of football was seen to be failing in that regard, he was always going to struggle to keep the fanbase with him.
I think the article is a little unfair on a group of managers whose overall records are good enough to have some of today's bright young things being more than happy to emulate them, but it's hard to feel much sympathy for them - I daresay that they'll find jobs somewhere in the future, but there's a definite feeling around that they had their time and things have moved on (except at Cardiff!) .
Imagine an alternative universe where allardyce wasn't dodgy and had remained England manager instead of Southgate. How would things have been over the last few years
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