How impossible is the England manager’s job really?
Lee Carsley has more to deal with than football
Stand at the north end of Leamington’s ground as an away supporter and you’ll have to walk the length of the touchline and then turn towards the fans gathered behind your own goalkeeper in order to get to the bar.
This rather mundane fact created one of my favourite nibbles of the season so far on Saturday, when Cally Stewart’s second goal of the afternoon – the 82nd competitive goal I’ve seen him score in person, by my count – put the Brakes 2-1 up against Spennymoor Town in the National League North.
A number of Spennymoor fans chose this moment to top up their plastic cups in the clubhouse and were treated to a few knowing rounds of “We can see you sneaking out” from the Leamington supporters.
Cue the angriest man I’ve ever seen at football. Brilliant.
Don’t miss this week’s Beefy Bites!
How impossible is the England manager’s job really?
Three weeks into 1994, television viewers were treated to the inside story of England's dramatic failure to qualify for the forthcoming World Cup in the United States of America.
Ken McGill had made a Cutting Edge documentary from within the England camp, to which he was given an almost unprecedented and probably unwise degree of access. The result was a film that remains compelling and illuminating viewing to this day, with more than a few unusual turns of phrase thrown in for good measure.
The documentary, broadcast to a bruised football nation, left little to the imagination with its title. Graham Taylor: An Impossible Job became a benchmark for sports documentary filmmaking and crystallised an epithet for the role of the England manager that the English, deep down, had long held to be true.
But is the England job really impossible? What does that even mean? Thirty years on, what might the summer of 2024 – a summer in which the role changed hands – tell us about the inner workings of the supposed pinnacle of management in the English men's game?
The outgoing manager was Gareth Southgate. Under his guidance, England turned reaching the latter stages of major tournaments into a habit. They made the World Cup semi-final for the first time since 1990 and the final of the European Championships for the first time ever and then the second.
Qualification was a given; Southgate’s harshest critics would do well to remember that hasn’t always been the case. England have routinely fallen into traps before and during summer tournaments. Sneer all you want about only beating Colombia and Sweden, or Denmark, or Slovakia, but know that these are exactly the obstacles England have historically failed to clear.
Southgate was a success. Imperfect, certainly, but a success. He benefited from a talented generation of players and his own ability to harness them by way of a culture and environment that can’t have been easy to create. Yet he was maligned – not entirely without justification but to a wholly ludicrous extent – and then he resigned.
There are obvious parallels between the genesis of Southgate’s England and the selection of his successor. Like Southgate, Lee Carsley has limited managerial experience in the club game but has been drafted from within the Football Association. He’s an interim appointment with an impressive record in charge of England Under-21s and he will be closer to getting the gig for real than most people might imagine.
England’s next fixtures are in the UEFA Nations League, in which they’ll play Finland, the Republic of Ireland and Greece after dropping into League B. Carsley has a towering reputation both in the coaching community and within the FA and is widely regarded to be a decent man with the emotional intelligence to build on Southgate’s off-field wins.
Win five or six Nations League matches on the field this autumn and Carsley might well be asked to make the step up full-time. If he does, he’ll be very aware that the England job is unlike any other. It’s different, and it’s difficult. It takes an unusual coaching profile to make it work.
Carsley’s first order of business will be to continue Southgate’s work in establishing a united England camp. Identifying any cliques and developing riffs is paramount. 2018 is a long time ago and keeping club rivalries at bay in the international set-up is an evolving challenge.
The interim manager has inherited a group of players – used and under-used, capped and uncapped – of undeniable quality. Carsley needs those players to perform to their potential individually and collectively, and extracting that level of performance from them is perhaps his biggest test of all.
By hook or by crook, Southgate deployed a system to achieve that at EURO 2024. It wasn’t pretty and it put the manager in the firing line. It seemed to constrain world class players like Jude Bellingham and Phil Foden, and it relied too heavily on Harry Kane when he wasn’t at his best. But it worked.
Carsley will look to push that on to the next level. Despite Southgate achieving consistency none of his predecessors managed, there is another level to which Carsley can aspire. It’ll take more than just an outstanding coach to get there. It’ll take a master of international football and federation politics too.
International football is a curious beast. Managers spend comparatively little time with their players, limiting their ability to communicate their plans and ideas. It suits some coaches better than others, and, for reasons that are his own, Carsley’s career path since retiring as a player seems to put him in the first category.
There’s a difference between choices and capabilities. We can assume a coach of Carsley’s standing will be as adept at eking out his own attributes as those of his players, but we don’t know until we know. The Nations League matches will tell us a lot.
The Football Association as an institution likes to present itself as progressive. In some ways, it is. But one can’t help but imagine the machinations and politicking that go on in the bowels of Wembley even now. Navigating those murky waters is a big part of being the England manager. Suits are better disposed to what they know.
Carsley is well positioned in that regard but it’s still an unfortunate additional challenge facing every England manager. The FA likes an FA man. Don’t underestimate the potency of that when decision time comes around in the winter. Only then does the behind-closed-doors job really begin.
There’s also self-preservation and presentation to be done from the inside facing out. To perfect the England job is to manage the media as much as the football. The venomous history between the two leaves precious little room for error. The rump of journalists who cover England is a particularly unforgiving one and has been for as long as any of us can remember.
In permanently replacing Southgate, Carsley would also be fulfilling the role that was made extremely unpleasant for gaffer after gaffer, one way or another, and the best evidence we have for that is laced through An Impossible Job. The footage of Taylor interacting with the written press is less than edifying. It doesn’t seem quite so bad now but the barbs are still there when things go wrong.
So, it’s a challenge – a tricky, unusual one at that. But is the England job impossible?
That’s not really how sport works. Nothing here is impossible. With the best use of resources, the right handling of the FA and the media, a lot of good results and a ton of luck, the England boss can succeed. Indeed, the very fact that there’s no ceiling is perversely held against them.
It’s fair that the media and the public feel optimistic. Carsley and whoever comes next will have a lot to work with. But the expectations of England have to be realistic too.
We can demand that the FA and the England manager do their utmost to find a way to maximise the potential of the players and the systems that produce them but England have no right to win anything. International trophies are scarce and trying to win them is complicated by the basic fact that there are other countries trying to win them too.
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“In the absence of live VAR audio being broadcast, as it is not permitted in football, the Premier League Match Centre will be able to relay on social media near-live information from the VAR Hub during a game.”
These are actual words from an actual statement from the actual Premier League. Football is so stupid.
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Dessert
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