The name of the newly appointed England football team manager Thomas Tuchel is displayed on a large screen behind a statue of England’s iconic World Cup winner and captain Bobby Moore at Wembley on Oct 16. — AP
AS a rule of thumb, it pays to look at the cast of characters already arrayed on one side of an argument before deciding to join them.
When that list starts with Nigel Farage, swallows up Sam Allardyce and eventually sprawls across the editorial board of The Daily Mail, it should, really, serve as a burning red flag.
That all three should have taken roughly the same position on England’s decision to appoint Thomas Tuchel as manager of its men’s national football team is not anything approaching a surprise.
Allardyce, in his defence, at least made a cogent and relevant case: Hiring a foreigner to lead the English national team could hardly be said to encourage English coaches.
Farage and The Mail could not even muster that level of subtlety. Farage, England’s most stubborn bargain-basement populist, just wants the England manager to be English.
The Mail seemed especially vexed that the choice was German.
Still, as England’s fans tried to define their personal reaction to Tuchel’s arrival, many would – not unreasonably – have concluded that the presence of Farage and the rest clinched the matter.
Tuchel celebrates with the trophy after winning the Champions League final with Chelsea on May 29, 2021. — AP
Much of public discourse is underpinned, now, by the belief that our identities are what is known as stacked: that what an individual thinks about abortion, say, is a reliable indicator of their views on gun control.
To side with Farage, The Mail and the rest on Tuchel, then, would involve being unwillingly and unwittingly tethered to their views on a variety of subjects. It might, even, be seen to serve as a tacit endorsement of their positions on immigration, say, or who is and who is not eligible to claim English national identity.
And yet, as the reaction to Tuchel’s hiring has unspooled over the past few days, it should have become clear that it is not quite so simple as that.
An individual’s views on whether the England manager should be English – whether, in other words, the rules on who can represent a country in international football apply only to those on the field or whether they also extend to those on the bench – do not map neatly on to the familiar spectrum of left and right, progressive and conservative.
All the Football Association have done is appoint the obvious, outstanding candidate. They have not broken any rules in doing so.
Fine, most major nations tend to go for native coaches, but Portugal are coached by a Spaniard, Belgium by an Italian-born German, and the United States (men) by an Argentine and (women) an Englishwoman.
Seven of the 10 teams currently vying for a World Cup spot from South America are coached by Argentines. Only one of those teams is Argentina.
Suggesting that the England team should make themselves an exception can therefore be characterised as a little pretentious, slightly holier-than-thou, and also insular, small-minded – maybe even xenophobic.
The idea that a job should go to the best candidate, regardless of nationality or skin colour or religion or sexual orientation, is a central tenet of the liberal mindset. Demurring seems, well, more than a little Farage-ist.
That argument is perfectly valid. It is one to be engaged with in good faith. But so, too, are its rebuttals. Not the reactionary one accentuated by The Mail – it does not matter in the slightest that Tuchel is a German – but those that are less deliberately incendiary.
One of them is sporting: What is international football for, if not to test the best of one country against the best of another?
That principle applies to the players on the field and is, rightly, fiercely defended. Nobody would dream of suggesting that England, a little short at central defender these days, should go and pluck some uncapped prospect from Argentina.
FIFA took exception years ago when Qatar, for one, attempted to field a team of naturalised players.
It is possible to draw a line there, to say that the manager is an accessory to a game, rather than a participant in it.
But that seems at odds with the pervasive atmosphere in modern football, in which the most consequential figure in any fixture is often assumed to be the manager.
The aim is to test what a country can produce by itself. The appeal, in a game increasingly defined by the capacity of unfathomably rich teams to buy solutions to their problems, is in seeing countries forced to make do and mend, to find the best way to accentuate their strengths and to disguise their weaknesses.
It is what makes the World Cup, say, both less predictable and more compelling than the Champions League.
Tuchel is the third foreign coach of the country’s men’s team. (Sarina Wiegman, a Dutch coach, led England’s women to the European Championship in 2022.)
Like Tuchel, the previous examples were recruited on the logic that the coach should not be subject to the same restrictions as the players, that the only criteria that mattered were their qualifications.
Like with Tuchel’s hiring, those decisions were criticised out of knee-jerk prejudice. And like him, those predecessors were therefore defended on the grounds that only prejudice could explain the objections. The coach of the national team should be the best candidate for the job; nothing else was relevant.
To feel the England team should both consist of and be coached by the English was seen as old-fashioned at best, and bigoted at worst. It was cast as an indelibly right-wing view.
The Premier League is, at heart, a monument to unashamedly Thatcherite principles, a triumph of naked and unabashed capitalism. Its influence on the way the English think about every aspect of football is more profound than is often realised.
It is in England where the transfer market is most frenzied. It is in England where owners, no matter how dubious the origins of their wealth, are welcomed so long as they bring with them a war chest with which to acquire players.
And so it is in England, naturally, where the issue of not being able to produce high-quality coaches is solved by simply hiring someone from the outside.
The lines, here, are sufficiently blurred that Farage and The Daily Mail find themselves, on some level, lined up against the forces of the free market.
That in itself is an indication that the issue of whether the England manager should be English does not fit neatly into any sort of stacked identity.
Their reasons for objecting might be straightforward, noxious and wholly predictable. But, in this one case, perhaps that does not render all objections invalid. — NYT
