Having brought lowly Burnley up from the doldrums of the Championship to the Premier League on no less than two occasions, there’s now doubting that Sean Dyche is considered one of English football’s brightest managers.
Despite his impressive CV, the former Chesterfield captain is a firm believer in the narrative that English managers aren’t afforded a fair crack of the whip compared to their foreign counterparts.
Showing his frustration at the “branded jeans” mentality throughout the modern game, and with this seasons heavy influx of superstar foreign managers very much his cue, Dyche has yet again sounded out his frustration at all the more fashionable continental types taking up all the good jobs.
He laments;
Generally there is still this edge towards foreign coaches and managers.
Why do you buy a branded pair of jeans rather than the other pair? Because you think they’re better, but they might not be.
I think there’s a bit of that, sometimes it’s just (the fact that) a bigger name is a bigger name. There’s foreign owners, there’s lots of foreign players, so it might be that a foreign manager is chosen to work with foreign players.
There’s a bit of spin. There’s still a thirst from the populous for foreign managers and foreign players. They’re a bit more snazzy, ‘let’s see what this Belgian manager or this Argentinian manager can do’.
It seems to me it’s still there, it has been for a number of years, and I don’t think it’s radically changing.
The man once tagged as the ‘Ginger Mourinho’ then moved on to the sometimes laughable notion that the methods of foreign coaches out-weigh those born and bred on these ‘ere isles
Antonio Conte came in at Chelsea and he got commended for bringing a hard, fast, new leadership to Chelsea, which involved doing 800m runs, 400m runs and 200m runs.
I thought that was interesting because if you see us doing that you’d say we’re running them round in circles – ‘a young English dinosaur manager. Doesn’t know what he’s doing’. At Chelsea under Conte everyone thinks it’s amazing.
I saw (City left-back Gael Clichy) talking about the diet that Pep has brought in. He’s stopped pizza…he’s a genius already in my view.
The year before Claudio Ranieri was adding pizza at Leicester. Two geniuses, one adding pizza and one taking it away.
I’m being flippant but I’m being serious as well. It’s true, that is the misperception.
Clichy was talking about how this new diet was amazing, saying we don’t eat junk food. We’ve been doing that since I got here. I did it at Watford, so do other English managers.
Whilst you can forgive the man for showing a little frustration that bigger jobs continually pass him and those of his ilk by, fact his until English managers perform vastly above their expected targets, this narrative could be a long boring one running for decades to come.
However, to think that club owners hire purely on their non English status is somewhat laughable to us.
What do they want? experience at the highest European level. What current English managers have it? unfortunately non too many. Then again, to overly simplify all 68 English managers as out of their depth dinosaurs is a lazy stereotype from yesteryear.