Do British Managers Have a Future in the Premier League?

This story originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

For a few years now, British football has been subject to a bubbling undercurrent of panic over the state of the nation's coaching. Every so often, when a home-grown boss is handed his P45 or passed up for a top job, things reach a fitful boil.

In most instances the arguments are as spurious as they are dull, but in the case of the latest sacking, there is real significance. The man in question is Brendan Rodgers, of course, and his relieving of duties at Anfield speaks to the bigger picture in a way that the tabloid-enraging dismissals of your 'Arrys and your Big Sams never did.

When he pitched up on Merseyside in 2012, Rodgers was billed as the face of British coaching's long-awaited enlightenment era. Rather than having been fast-tracked from pitch to dugout without the time to catch breath, Rodgers was a studious type who'd learnt his trade on the continent and developed a clear vision centred around the semi-radical ideals of technique and possession. In the same year that Harry Redknapp admitted to lifelong illiteracy, the interview that clinched Rodgers the Liverpool job comprised of him presenting a self-prepared 180-page dossier to his prospective bosses.

When, a year later, David Moyes – another young coach who'd traversed Spain for ideas to implement back home – was coronated at Old Trafford, things suddenly looked rosy for British coaching. One by one, football's monochrome establishment figures – Dalglish, McLeish, Warnock, McCarthy, O'Neill – were dropping by the wayside, their replacements positively technicolour by comparison. The times, it seemed, were a-changin'.

Fast forward three years and that rosy sheen has been washed away. As opposed to continuing Alex Ferguson Glaswegian dynasty, Moyes spent his 11 months at Old Trafford elevating anxiety-stricken failure to something approaching performance art, while Rodgers' PowerPoint penchant has seen him touted for Wernham Hogg more than Wembley. Each has been discarded and replaced by a better-qualified man from abroad.

Once more, with England's top jobs, it's the negatives that jump out. In his 12 years of grinning vacantly from Stamford Bridge's armoured executive boxes, Roman Abramovich has hired Portuguese, Israeli, Brazilian, Dutch, Italian and Spanish managers, but never a Brit. Sheikh Mansour's first move as Manchester City owner was to swiftly introduce his boot to Mark Hughes' arse and hire suave Italian Roberto Mancini.

Manchester United and Liverpool fought the tide in their drive to hire British, but the fact remains that when their situations became critical, it was continental big-hitters that they turned to. And it is all with good reason, too. Top-level football is moving away from the model English bosses are accustomed to.

Much has been made of the fact that the sandpaper of the modern game has whittled down the tenure of today's managers to a fraction of that of yesteryear (it currently averages less than a year, if you exclude wild outlier Arsene Wenger) and the popular response is to deride the jerking knees and myopic thinking of the airheaded modern owner.

In many cases this is true, but there's another possible side to this increased disposability, too: perhaps football clubs are starting to see their managers as more dispensable because their management structures run deeper than just one man.

Take Manchester City, whose double-poaching of behind-the-scenes staff from Barcelona means that nowadays the club's backstage orchestrators are Txiki Begiristain and Fernando Soriano, the pair's responsibilities encompassing scouting, recruitment and the club's (dazzlingly revamped) youth academy. At Chelsea, Michael Emenalo and Marina Granovskaia take on many of the same duties. Further down the league, proto-clubs Southampton and Swansea have structures in place that mean on-field philosophy remains constant even while manager after manager is cherry-picked by the big clubs.

And yet there is a widespread unwillingness amongst British managers to work within this sort of hierarchy. Despite his worldly persona, Rodgers' acceptance of the Liverpool job was contingent on the owners vetoing the director of football set-up they had envisaged. Tony Pulis – who walked out of Crystal Palace after a power-struggle over transfers – took over at West Brom only after wrestling a large degree of authority from the suits upstairs, and Sam Allardyce's move to Sunderland was reportedly dependent on much the same issues.

Our old friend Harry Redknapp embodies the British approach to football management better than anyone. "To expect me to work with players someone else has decided I want is a nonsense. It's a joke," he says.

His beliefs, obstinate as they might seem, have not sprung from nowhere. The British model of management is still largely predicated around the legendary leader figures of its past: Chapman, Busby, Shankly, Stein, Clough, Ferguson. To a man, these were omnipotent controller figures, men who reshaped and remodelled entire clubs over entire decades. Men whose core currency was control.

Ferguson told the Harvard Business Review recently: "Before I came to United, I told myself I wasn't going to allow anyone to be stronger than I was. Your personality has to be bigger than theirs. That's vital … It's not about looking for adversity or for opportunities to prove power; it's about having control and being authoritative."

But Ferguson's idea of the job is no longer a workable blueprint. It's predicated on a managerial lifespan that lasts rather longer than the insect-like one of today. Wenger is the exception that proves the rule here, his time at Arsenal now totalling more than his other 19 Premier League peers combined. (Indeed, there's no little irony in the fact that England's last remaining autocrat is a Frenchman widely credited with dragging British football into cosmopolitan modernity.)

In fact, with Ferguson having openly acted as mentor to an entire generation of British coaches – the decent-but-limited Allardyce the teacher's pet – you have to wonder if these nuggets of wisdom actually did more harm than good in preparing his pupils for the realities of modern-day management.

Andre Villas-Boas, for example, actively sought to implement this sort of arrangement upon his own appointment at Spurs. "I think of a more European of structure, of a head coach and then the functions of a manager will be handed up to a different person," he said. "It's something that works." Like Rafa Benitez before him, Villas-Boas' undisguised fondness for novel and wholly un-English ideas saw him painted as a charlatan by a parochial press and eventually hounded out of the country, but other British clubs have since tuned into his wavelength.

Just as the one-club man is becoming ever-rarer, so is the one-man club. Whatever Ferguson's protestations, owners have cottoned on to the fact that allowing a single figure to build an entire institution from the top down is not the smartest way of doing things.

Look out across Europe's leading clubs and it quickly becomes clear that the remit of the man in the dugout is more that of a diplomat than dictator. With the brevity of their shelf-life almost taken for granted, absentee owners increasingly common and the world's top players world-famous multi-millionaires before they're out of their teens, the job of the elite manager is not to forge a club's identity but simply to ensure everyone gets on, and to provide the injection of rocket-fuel that takes the team onto silverware.

It's not all bad, though. One sacking, a shame as it may be, needn't equal a death knell. Brendan Rodgers will be back, and, once the realisation dawns that neither corporate-management speak nor open contempt for his recruitment team serve him especially well, will enjoy a fine career. Garry Monk at Swansea and Eddie Howe at Bournemouth have spent the past couple of years quietly demonstrating that British coaches – and coach is the word, in both cases – can both work at progressive clubs and produce progressive football.

There are myriad factors contributing to the glass ceiling British managers have found themselves under, not least the simple lack of people trying to forge a career in coaching. And as with the country's players, British managers' chances are systemically limited by a Premier League which is, as Roy Hodgson put it, "a European league played on English soil".

But the cultural factor has surely played its part, too – an obsession with absolute power befitting of a former empire nation. It's a losing battle. It may not come naturally but if British bosses want the chance in the top jobs, they may first need to relinquish autonomy. The day of the dictator is done.

@A_Hess