Why Thomas Tuchel should not be England manager

Throwing money at overseas talent reduces international game to an imitation of club football – the FA should have hired an English coach

It is remarkable that after 1,066 England games over 152 years, one still has to point out that international football is about measuring one country’s resources against another. It is what makes it all so joyfully random. It reveals the strengths and weaknesses of a national team in a way that does not happen in the club game. Why Argentina can win a World Cup with a former West Ham occasional as manager, a full-back who will later fail at Nottingham Forest, and the greatest player in the world.
For that reason alone, and to preserve the sanctity of the international game, the manager should follow the same principle. The England manager should be English. Otherwise, it is simply not international football. To suggest so draws the ire of people who seem not to understand that international football is the small corner of our public life where nationality matters. Not in an unpleasant way. In a harmless, intriguing way. Nationality is literally the point of international football.
Which is, sad to say, why Thomas Tuchel, a talented, multilingual, shrewd coach – born in Bavaria – should not be England manager. It would be impolite to blame him. He simply accepted the job. The issue lies with the English Football Association. The England squad is also currently lacking a viable left-back but none would seriously consider naturalising any promising uncapped spares Spain or France might have available.
Germany would never consider appointing an Englishman as head of their own formidable national team, and rightly so. They know instinctively that filling that role with a German is an obligation, not an option.
The international game is as much a measure of a country’s shortcomings as it is a country’s strengths. It is what makes the triumphs so enjoyable and the failures so painful. It represents a little part of us all – however much some might protest. Throwing money at overseas talent just reduces international football to a pale imitation of the club game. There are few national associations with the wealth to do the same. Others have to make do with what they have.
The English FA is buying its way out of a long-term problem it seems unwilling or unable to solve: a lack of English coaches it considers suitable.
Nevertheless the FA should have appointed an English coach. Whether that was Graham Potter or the next best option. The Tuchel appointment may yield a trophy. But that will not be the FA’s success. It will in part be that of the great German coaching culture that produced Tuchel and others like him – and that is not the point of international football.
Only the German Otto Rehhagel has won a World Cup or European championship as a hired gun manager. All the other 38 have been won by natives. But the FA, which stumbled into the Gareth Southgate era, and then failed to groom a suitable successor from the Under-21s path he had emerged from, is desperate to avoid criticism. By appointing Tuchel, it will feel it has shown it has done all it can. In other words, if he fails then the FA can shrug and suggest that perhaps, as the mythology has it, this is an impossible job.
But it is not impossible. It just needs good planning, development and a belief in the principle of international football. That is not to be hostile to Tuchel, or indeed the Lionesses’ Sarina Wiegman. The fault does not lie with them. Neither does their success change the picture. It just ignores the fundamental problem.