Coaching England’s Football Team Is a Job for the Insane

The English national team hasn't had a real manager since Fabio Capello resigned at the beginning of February. Stuart Pearce, a psychotic being with the haircut of a seven-year-old, was “caretaker” until Roy Hodgson was given the England manager job on Tuesday. Except managing the English national team is not a job. It is not a job because a job is something you’re paid to continuously do, presumably with the expectation you will do that thing successfully. Being England's manager is more a continuous fight against becoming a former England manager than it is anything else.

The English Premier League is great in that it’s one of the three or four best leagues in the world. This is a point of pride for English fans: They get to watch high-level soccer each weekend, not wear shirts, and faux-masturbate on the field all at the same time. The English national team, however, is not close to being one of the three or four best in the world. The dissonance in league-to-national-team quality produces some overblown expectations, which is due in part to irrational soccer diehards, but mostly to the English Football Authority (the FA).

Globalization, of course, means that it’s not just England’s game anymore, but the national team is uncompetitive because the FA hasn’t done anything of value since England won the World Cup 46 years ago. It’s spent the past half-century making a lot of money with the Premier League, not hosting any World Cups, and letting youth football languish. The FA’s a big, bloated, anachronistic monstrosity that occupies a bigger part of English society than any sporteaucrats ever should. (To be fair, they’re finally creating a national football training center for managers and for promising youth players, albeit 20-plus years after France did the same.)

There are more reasons why the English manager job stinks. There are the impossible-to-meet expectations of an island of pasty, blood-sausage-inventing prawn-cakes. There’s a gang of vicious media attack dogs that will pick through your dead teenage daughter’s voicemails without telling you. The football press isn’t quite as bad as the twisted souls in charge of the mainstream tabloids, but for the past few months they’ve openly championed the hiring of another famously media-chummy manager for the national team, creating an uncomfortable dynamic before Hodgson even officially took over. If things go poorly—and as manager of England, things tend to—you’ll be made into the “Wally with the Brolly,” a nickname for former manager Steve McClaren, who helplessly held an umbrella on the sidelines of the game that sealed England’s non-qualification for the 2008 European Championships. If not, maybe your various sexual and proclivities will be made public as happened with Sven-Göran Eriksson, a man who only lost three competitive games in six years as England boss.

Or you’ll just resign, like Capello, one of the most accomplished, respected managers on Earth. Sure, Capello did some dumb things at the 2010 World Cup: playing sieve-cum-goalie Robert Green and a 30-year-old forward with seven career goals; championing his rankings system. He resigned, though, because his captain, John Terry, who also once slept with a teammate’s wife, had his captaincy taken away by the English Football Association, the sport’s governing body, after he was accused of racism against another player. Having a possibly racist, generally terrible dude as your captain isn’t a good look, but Capello wasn’t cool with the FA taking action before any legal ruling was handed down, so he walked away.

That’s the soap-opera-esque scene Hodgson, who looks like an owl and once tried to erase his own face with his hands, steps into. He’s managed 20 teams over 36 years, and his most high-profile gig was an amazing flameout with Liverpool last year. He lasted there for just 191 days. Only his Scandinavian teams have won anything. Hodgson’s been a semi-wizard at getting teams to punch above their talent level (so, one possibly-translating and relevant positive!), but he also carries the reputation of a staunchly retrograde, stubborn tactical mind, which has been one of English soccer’s biggest problems since forever. And he’s currently managing the 10th-place team in the Premier League.

It’s an underwhelming hiring in just about every way, but none of that really matters. This is not a task that a necessarily talented, right-minded, opinionated person would accept. It’s kind of like the Orioles gig from last year. Managing England hasn’t been a good move for anything other than the manager’s bank account for about 20 years. So of course the FA offered the position, and a four-year contract, to a 64-year-old man who hasn’t stuck at a job for four years since the 80s. They might think he’s the best man for the job, or he’s the only one blind and desperate enough to want it. You can figure out which is worse.

@rwohan