Five reasons why replacing Gareth Southgate as England manager is a terrible job
England are on the lookout for a new manager after the shameful failure of Gareth Southgate to win a trophy after taking on a team that had crashed out of the 2014 World Cup in the group stage and then lost to Iceland in the last 16 of Euro 2016.
It does all make it sound like it might be a genuinely impossible job, here are five reasons why taking the England job now would be a terrible idea as a counterpoint to this giddy nonsense.
A high bar
While there are plenty of England fans who would apparently be happy enough just to see some good football from the new man with results somewhat secondary, there is a still understandably large pro-Southgate lobby that points with an enormous deal of justification to a tournament record that reads semi-final, final, quarter-final, final for a team that had reached one final and three semi-finals in its entire history before Gazball.
Whoever the next manager is will have little margin for error when tournament time rolls around. The grounds have shifted. The quarter-finals have moved from broadly acceptable heroic failure territory to the very barest of minimums.
No England manager has ever been or ever will be permitted to operate without extreme pressure. Southgate’s replacement, whoever that may be, would face greater and less reasonable demands than any has ever faced before.
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Banana skins
We’ve talked elsewhere about how England’s Nations League Group B campaign offers a chance to make a point against theoretically lesser opposition and secure a low-key but tangible achievement in getting England back into the top tier of that beloved competition.
But consider the alternative. Imagine if you don’t do that. Imagine if England are left as the sleepiest of giants in the second tier or, heaven forbid, worse.
No amount of pretty football is going to cover that for a lot of people who will suddenly care deeply and passionately about the Nations League as they always have. And it would at a stroke take the wind from the new manager’s sails.
Failure to get out of the second tier of the Nations League would kind of end the ‘kind draw’ caveat about Southgate’s tournament tenure and knives would be out.
England managers don’t generally get much of a honeymoon period anyway, but the new man is going to take the role at a very weird time when the ways to win people over are pretty clear but the ways it can go wrong are many and varied and also come into play very, very quickly. The benefit of being in the second tier of the Nations League are the chance to get some early wins under the belt, but the flipside is clear.
Absolutely no margin for error exists in those first games. There will be no honeymoon period.
The pay
Don’t get us wrong, it’s tidy money for what is in effect a part-time job (albeit with full-time pressures). Gareth Southgate has been (what tabloid law dictates must be referred to as) trousering a cool £5m a year as England manager, but that places him at the bottom end of the Premier League managerial pay-scale.
Eddie Howe, for instance, would have plenty of things to consider were he to be approached for the job and the ghastly business of coin would inevitably be among them. He would have to take a significant if in practice largely immaterial pay cut were he to take the job.
Looming striker crisis
Time will tell whether Harry Kane’s lumbering lethargy in Germany was injury hangover, extreme weariness after his first season in new surroundings or a more significant start of something far more terminal.
If it’s the latter, the new manager could pretty quickly find life rather tricky. Ivan Toney’s content-creating penalty and Ollie Watkins’ moment of magic against Netherlands show that the cupboard isn’t entirely bare, but the path both men have taken to England honours via the lower leagues has taken time. Both men are 28, and neither are a particularly viable long-term successor for Kane.
Southgate never really fancied Dominic Solanke for whatever reason despite his 19 goals for Bournemouth last season, but he’s now 26 and entirely untested at international level and you’re looking a long, long way down the Premier League goalscorers list before you get to any more English strikers.
It’s a pretty serious issue England’s new manager is going to have to deal with during his first couple of years in the job. Maybe we will end up going all in on Cole Palmer as a false nine…
A (potentially) hostile media
This very much depends on who the new manager is, but there is still a very large and noisy section of the football media that doesn’t just back Southgate (which is fine) but refuse to even acknowledge his detractors’ criticisms, generally straw-manning them into one or both of two demands: that people demand England play like Brazil 82, or that people demand England win every tournament they play.
The rather more accurate ‘we should improve the football somewhat’ is ignored and exaggerated because to face that criticism in reality would mean to acknowledge it has some basis.
It is not ridiculous or ungrateful to acknowledge that Southgate has done a brilliant job and transformed the culture around the England team while significantly improving tournament results but also to think that the next stage of the task might, after eight years of near misses, be better suited to someone else.
If Southgate’s replacement isn’t someone the pack instinctively approve of, they could be in for a tricky spell. If the new manager isn’t English or doesn’t Speak Well, I Thought at his unveiling, then the ride could get bumpy.
Eddie Howe would obviously have no problems, while even foreign choices could be okay here if they are deemed to sufficiently ‘get’ English football and can tick the second box. Your Klopps, Your Pochettinos. But imagine if it’s, say, Thomas Tuchel…
LATEST ON NEW ENGLAND MANAGER FROM F365:
👉 Potter, Howe and Klopp’s England starting line-ups: Kane and Pickford dropped with White recalled
👉 Southgate has gone; can Lee Carsley bring on the England ‘chaos’ era?
👉 Who will be the next England manager after Gareth Southgate?
