Roy Hodgson, David Moyes and Graham Potter were all judged far more harshly than the Portuguese
Compare the headlines following a defeat after David Moyes’s first five months in charge at Manchester United, and those after Ruben Amorim’s latest defeat in the same amount of time, and it tells us a lot about the attitude towards British managers.
On Monday, much of the focus of a disappointing defeat to Wolves was on misfiring forward Rasmus Hojlund. There was a little talk of “misery”. Some damning statistics relating to this season.
On 8 January 2014, the day after United’s League Cup semi-final first-leg defeat to Sunderland, who were bottom of the Premier League, Moyes was murdered. Or, as the back-page splash of The Sun put it: “MOYDERED.”
Moyes was “deep in the mire”, The Daily Mail said. The Daily Telegraph said the season had gone “From bad to worse” for the Scot. The “agony goes on”, said The Times.
It feels like if Ruben Amorim was called Robbie Arnold, and had been born in Dudley, there would be an entirely different conversation. God forbid he was called Gareth Southgate.
If United’s form continues to crash, will we see another bookmaker pay someone to dress as the Grim Reaper and sit in the stands, as was the case in the last game before Moyes was sacked? It seems unlikely.
You can say they were different times, that Moyes vs Amorim is an unfair comparison.
Moyes presided over the early collapse of the empire Sir Alex Ferguson built; Amorim has stepped into the ruins 11 years later, trying to piece them back together.
That League Cup defeat under Moyes was a third successive defeat for only the first time in 13 years. But the statistics pouring out of Amorim’s defeat on Sunday weren’t great, either. Fifteen league defeats, a record since the Premier League began. Eight home defeats – the most since 1963. It was the first time Wolves have beaten United home and away since 1980.
And the expectation has not dimmed at United, despite all that has happened since.
The way Amorim remains relatively unscathed paints a bleak picture for British managers, whose deficit was laid bare when the closest the Football Association could get to appointing one capable of winning a trophy with England was a German who had managed in the Premier League.
While the German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and Argentinian coaches became sexy and breathless and played football the way it should be played, British coaches became firefighters and relegation hustlers.
The Brits were gangsters and geezers – ooers and aahers. Their counterparts in the rest of the world were philosophers and deep thinkers, even though Jose Mourinho was busy gouging people’s eyes in the years before he was offered the United job.
Sam Allardyce became indistinguishable from his long balls, even though “Big Sam” developed one of the most innovative sports science departments of his time.
Alan Pardew will forever be remembered for dad-dancing on the Wembley touchline, shortly before losing the FA Cup final with Crystal Palace.
Alan Curbishley became an ongoing online joke about being linked, but not getting, every job going. Until the links disappeared.
Roy Hodgson went backpacking around Europe for two decades to shed the tag of being too British, winning trophies all over the place and reaching the Uefa Cup final with Inter Milan before being handed his first job at a Premier League club.
He guided Blackburn Rovers to sixth, and qualified for the Uefa Cup, before being sacked a few months into his second season.
He was exiled back on the road for another decade, finally landing a job at one of the Big Six. Half a season at Liverpool was all he got.
United have not gone near another British manager since Moyes, beyond a couple of caretakers. That’s another moniker – they are the caretakers of English football’s elite.
Can the perception of British coaches change? Will they ever be given as much time and patience in a big job as sexier names? Or even given one?
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Maybe, but it will require chance and graft to shift the vogue.
Eddie Howe desperately tries to burst the myth of the British coach, determined to build his way to the top at Newcastle United. Nonetheless, he carries a heavy mantle since becoming the first English coach – after Harry Redknapp – to win a major trophy in 17 years.
The Carabao Cup barely makes a scratch. A Premier League title would strike a significant blow.
If Southgate had been given the United job – he was on a shortlist of coaches preferred by part-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe – and had rebuilt the culture, as he did with England, turned around that great, sinking ship and won a few trophies, as he nearly did with England, it will have chipped away at the ankle tag.
Graham Potter followed the Hodgson playbook and spent seven years in the Swedish wilderness to rub away some of the Britishness. And it almost worked, when he landed a plum job at Chelsea, only for volatile circumstances to explode and force Potter to reset. One step forward, several back.
A few of the great recent ex-England pros – Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard – are giving it a go but, largely, failing. Two of them are out of work, and the only faint glimmer is coming from Lampard pushing for a place in the Championship play-offs at Coventry City.
And what of Moyes? The Scot was cast as a has-been and a dinosaur during a bleak decade before winning West Ham a first European trophy in 58 years.
Even then, nobody ever seemed quite convinced by him, despite having done all that was asked of him in two spells spanning seven years at a mid-to-bottom Premier League club.
West Ham lost Declan Rice – a once-in-a-generation player for them – and the following season finished ninth and reached two quarter-finals.
Moyes lost his job, which is pretty much how it goes.