Nwankwo Kanu was no longer an athlete by 2006. Tony Adams, knowing his Arsenal data from two seasons before, cautioned Harry Redknapp against the signing. But Redknapp thought of Kanu’s ability, and brought him to Portsmouth from West Bromwich Albion.
He accepted the star’s body — and motivation — could be delicate. After a game at Middlesbrough, poor Kanu felt so exhausted he needed a wheelchair at the airport.
Monday mornings just weren’t his scene. Late on Sundays, Redknapp came to expect the call: Kanu, at home in London, ringing from his bed. “Hello gaffer, it’s the King. I won’t be training tomorrow.”
But Kanu rewarded Redknapp with moments of brilliance and an immortal goal to tip the 2008 FA Cup final against Cardiff City Portsmouth’s way. People talk about football like it’s science these days, but being a winning manager remains an art. So few from England master it.
No English manager has won a significant domestic honour here since. In the past 17 years, English clubs have competed for 93 major trophies and yet the closest a compatriot came to emulating Redknapp was . . . Redknapp himself, when his Tottenham Hotspur took Manchester United to penalties in the 2009 League Cup final.
The most recent English manager to win anything noteworthy was Steve McClaren, when he took FC Twente to the Dutch title in 2010. No Englishman has coached a team to win the Premier League in its 33-year history and none has even finished second since Kevin Keegan with Newcastle United in 1995-96.
You look at other countries; 30 of the past 32 Italian titles have been won by Italian managers; English coaches have overseen 75 Champions League matches, Italians more than 1,000.
The English national team are on to their third foreign manager — a German — whereas Germany have never had one. And, if you list the past five German coaches to win a domestic trophy you only get as far back as Edin Terzic in 2021. Do the same exercise with English coaches and you find the fifth-last one was Roy Evans, claiming the League Cup with Liverpool 30 years ago.
Now, another opportunity to break the drought comes to Eddie Howe, a former player of Redknapp’s, in the Carabao Cup final with Newcastle for a second time in three years. His body of work makes him, quite easily, the best English manager of his generation and he wears his determination on his sleeve.
I remember visiting him early in his second Premier League season with Bournemouth, in 2016. Taped to the home dressing room door at the Vitality Stadium was a handmade poster saying “WORK HARD” and Howe said: “The big thing that influenced my managerial career is frustration. I hadn’t achieved greatness as a player that I wanted so much. To play in the Premier League. To win trophies. I was obsessed with winning and didn’t do much of it.”
On becoming a coach, he said earnestly in another interview: “How else could I make a mark on society?”
He started young, and at 47 has already managed 707 senior games, but a look at who he is up against at Wembley gives an insight into why so few English managers succeed. Arne Slot, a Dutch title-winner and European finalist before joining Liverpool, is an example, never more embodied than by Pep Guardiola, of the foreign super-coach headhunted by the Premier League.
But even the “ordinary” foreign managers in the competition are a formidable group, rich in experience. There’s Nuno Espírito Santo, a Champions League-winning player who has managed in four countries and been exposed to very different jobs, beginning as Malaga’s goalkeeping coach. There’s Thomas Frank, 18 years a distinguished youth coach before moving into management. There’s Marco Silva, who started as a technical director in the Portuguese second tier.
Bournemouth’s Andoni Iraola completed two years of a law degree and went to Cyprus for his first managerial post (he was sacked) aged 36. Crystal Palace’s Oliver Glasner is a business graduate who worked in Red Bull Salzburg’s marketing department before drawing on his 500 games as a professional footballer to coach.
The sheer human and intellectual level of overseas competitors for English coaching jobs was brought home by meeting Rubén Sellés (now of Hull City) at Reading. Here was a young Spaniard who held two degrees and had got part way through a sports PhD (at university in Barcelona, in “attacking/counterattacking transitions linked to repeat sprint ability”) before taking coaching posts in Greece, Russia, Azerbaijan, Spain and Denmark on his way to an assistant’s role at Southampton.
His path was such a far cry from the old English model of the top player leaping straight — sometimes without coaching badges — from the pitch to the dugout. Yet this is the age of the Sellés, of Fabian Hürzeler, Brighton & Hove Albion’s 32-year-old head coach. The trend is going only one way: from a 1995-96 high of 86 per cent of Premier League managers being English, now it is 10 per cent.
That’s two out of 20 — Howe and Graham Potter — and it is no coincidence that they have profiles similar to their foreign rivals and not matching that of the traditional, English, big-player-turned-coach. Potter has a social sciences degree and worked his way up through university football and the lower divisions of Sweden. Howe was the quiet, studious, journeyman footballer whom they teased for walking around the training ground with The Times or The Guardian under his arm, who was in youth coaching by 30 and a full Pro Licence holder by 34.
He was working in Bournemouth’s school of excellence and at a New Year’s Eve party at the home of Richard Hughes (now Liverpool’s sporting director) when he took a call from the owner asking him to be interim manager. Howe accepted and before the midnight bells was on the phone, making his first signing.
Bournemouth were ten points adrift from safety in League Two, in administration and sometimes players would arrive at the stadium to find the doors padlocked because a bill to the landlords hadn’t been paid. Howe would pay for certain things out of his own pocket. They trained in a park, clearing the dog shit using plastic cups. Before a game against Shrewsbury Town, fans came in to clear snow off the pitch at Dean Court and Howe sent every one of them a personal thank-you letter.
Players got extra one-to-one coaching, were encouraged to stand up before the group and share their stories, and he was forever putting up a new motivational poster, or photograph, or trying a psychological tool. He would meet new signings at the station and, paternally, got Ryan Fraser to take cooking lessons.
These are the hard yards he was doing at the very start of his management journey and after miraculously securing Bournemouth’s league survival in 2009 he took them, step by step, to the Premier League.
All the while he kept educating himself, taking trips to study coaches such as Maurizio Sarri at Empoli and Lucien Favre at Borussia Dortmund. Iraola? Howe was on to him long before most of the Premier League. When Iraola was at Rayo Vallecano, Liverpool’s now chief executive of football, Michael Edwards, went to Spain to observe him at work and, standing at the side of the training pitch, bumped into Howe and his assistant, Jason Tindall.
Not everything Howe tries is successful — there was a disastrous squad away-day learning sheep-herding at Burnley — but his relentless desire to improve himself and others has continued at Newcastle, where we’ve seen him, bit by bit, grow into a high-profile job and develop careers.
It was no given that Alexander Isak would become one of the world’s best No9s: his last full season at Real Sociedad, before working with Howe, produced only six league goals. From Anthony Gordon to Joelinton to new England call-up, Dan Burn, he has made individuals better while producing one of the most collective, self-sacrificing teams in the country.
Howe winning the League Cup would be a timely shot in the arm to English coaching. The challenge is to produce more like him. A chat with a highly tipped young English coach working in the backroom staff at Premier League first team level was revealing.
He spent the last portion of his playing career preparing for coaching, in his spare time shadowing different roles at the club he played for. He worked with youth players, started doing his badges and began thinking hard about not just the playing style he wanted to coach but his working style: what should his week look like, his sessions, his typical day?
What he has seen among English peers is a reluctance to commit to this level of work and preparation. One issue is financial — many who have earned top-flight playing money don’t want to start with a low-paid youth job, and those in backroom Premier League positions don’t want to risk their security by embarking as a No1 in a £150,000-a-year League One job.
Another issue is snobbery, that idea of losing the elite status they had as players by managing low down in the Football League. But, he says, foreign coaches are not precious about starter salaries or starting at the bottom.
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It is uncomfortable for the FA that Howe (like other English coaching hopes Gary O’Neil and Liam Rosenior) did his Pro Licence with the Irish Football Association in Belfast and that Mikel Arteta studied in Wales, while Nuno — like José Mourinho before him — did so in Scotland. Also, that only two Premier League managers (Potter and Kieran McKenna) hold FA Pro Licences.
However Thomas Tuchel’s No2, Anthony Barry, did his badges at St George’s Park and the FA’s strategy for the next four years includes changing coach education so there is more support and bespoke learning for elite candidates. This year’s FA Pro Licence graduates include Jack Wilshere, who was in a group of students taken to a high-performing London school to observe an elite environment in a different setting. Another cohort spent a day with the London Air Ambulance.
Dan Clements, who joined from Welsh rugby as FA head of coach development two years ago, is now in charge of driving standards. Coaching is a global market and the Premier League its most competitive environment for jobs, so the only option is for English candidates to put in the work and FA to help them become not just high-level coaches but also high-level individuals.
“Coaching is an intellectual endeavour, you want people who are real critical thinkers,” Clements said. “We spend a lot of time within clubs and I’m very biased around practical application. You can sit in a classroom and talk till the cows come home, but coaching is about people and doing it.”
Can Howe do it at Wembley?
The last English manager to win the major trophies
Liverpool v Newcastle United
Carabao Cup final, Wembley
Sunday, 4.30pm
TV ITV1/Sky Sports
