WHEN the season began, quarter of the 20 Premier League clubs were managed by people with no previous experience of managing in the Premier League. At the same time only two of the 11 managers to have taken charge of four or more Premier League clubs began the season managing in the Premier League. It’s never straightforward to analyse patterns like this and it may all have changed by January, but the sense at the moment is of a change of vision across the league.
The five newcomers fall into perhaps three different categories.
There’s Frank Lampard, the former player of limited managerial experience who has been appointed only in part because of what he did at Derby last season. Really, Chelsea turned to him because they needed a figure with whom the fans will have patience to guide them through a difficult time when they are unable to register new players, in the hope that his eloquent television appearances are evidence of an astute tactical brain.
Then there’s the wily British managers with a record of achievement in the lower leagues. Chris Wilder, at 51, is the more experienced.
Having won four trophies in a 27-week spell with Alfreton Town, he took Oxford into the National League play-offs, then won promotion with Northampton and two promotions with Sheffield United. He is clearly an inspirational figure, but he is also tactically inventive, as his policy of overlapping centre-backs demonstrates.
Dean Smith is three years younger and has had less tangible success, although he got Walsall to the final of the Football League Trophy and was a popular figure at Brentford before taking Aston Villa up through the play-offs last season.
And then there’s what feels a very modern category: the exciting young manager whose previous experience has largely come overseas. Graham Potter is 44 and Daniel Farke 42. Potter made his name at Ostersund in Sweden before offering some confirmation of his potential with Swansea. Farke was essentially an inspired punt by Norwich’s sporting director Stuart Webber who saw the success David Wagner had had at Huddersfield and realised the man who had replaced him at Borussia Dortmund II shared many of the same working methods. Promotion last season suggests just how transferable those methods are.
It’s that last category that is perhaps most interesting, most suggestive of a wider shift in the game. As football becomes increasingly globalised, of course it makes less and less sense for clubs to recruit merely from their own country. The Championship a decade ago was stylistically, with a handful of exceptions, a very English league, based on defensive solidity, physicality and direct play. These days, there are lot of possession-driven sides, as well as those who press frenetically. It has become more varied, less insular, an environment in which the likes of Farke and Marcelo Bielsa can thrive.
And that seems to mean less of a role for the old-school British managers. There is no Sam Allardyce, no Mark Hughes, no Alan Pardew, no Harry Redknapp, no David Moyes… where once an experienced pair of hands would be seen as a safe appointment, somebody to bring stability, the world has moved on, as Newcastle have found in appointing Steve Bruce. Bruce is a manager of many virtues may yet do well back on Tyneside, but the reaction to his appointment suggested a preference for a less experienced visionary, a Farke or a Potter of their own. The familiar isn’t always a consolation.
The cases of Wilder and Smith show that the traditional route, although, narrow, remains open for British managers. Earn your spurs with smaller clubs and eventually you may be able to lead a Championship side to promotion. But Potter shows how an aspiring manager can jump the queue. Go abroad, prosper and respect is likely to come far more quickly than it ever did for Roy Hodgson when he followed that path four decades ago. It may not, though, be coincidence that Hodgson seems the most secure of the multi-club veterans still in work.
That’s in the optimism of August. Come January, Allardyce may be back in his hazmat suit, ready to save the day at another stricken side.
But while he perhaps still retains an allure as a possible firefighter, something that doesn’t feel true of Moyes or Pardew, it’s hard to imagine any club now appointing him long term. The world has moved on and modernity seems to have no place for the British football men.
