Gary Neville has warned the Football Association it has “hard questions to answer” after appointing German manager Thomas Tuchel as England’s new head coach.
Tuchel was announced on Wednesday as the new man in charge of the England national team after what the FA called a “very thorough” recruitment process. The 51-year-old will formally begin his role on 1 January, with Lee Carsley continuing in the interim.
Tuchel is the third foreign manager to lead England after Sven-Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello.
And while Neville, who played under Eriksson in an 85-cap England career, praised the FA for hiring one of the best managers in world football, he said it signalled a “rut” in the history of English coaching.
“I think everybody in our country including myself will wish him all the best and hope we can get over the line and win a trophy,” Neville told Sky Sports. “But I think there are some serious questions for the FA to answer in respect of English coaching.
“I do think we are damaging ourselves by accepting that Thomas Tuchel is better than any of the other English coaches. With the English coaches that have managed in the upper echelons of the league with Eddie Howe at Newcastle and Graham Potter, I do think there are outstanding coaches that could have been appointed that were English.”
Neville was assistant to Roy Hodgson when the FA established a new hub for English football at St George’s Park, in a bid to give the national game a sense of place and identity. Despite clear improvements in the technical quality of English players, elite managers are few and far between.
“What I have seen in this last 15, 20 years is the reputational damage that English coaching has taken,” Neville added. “We are in a rut when it comes to English coaching. English coaching is one of the least respected big nations in Europe when it comes to taking charge of a football team. Spanish, German, Italian coaches, Portuguese coaches are renowned for their styles of play, for their philosophy.
“We don’t have a clear identity as an English nation of what we are anymore. We haven’t built a style, we haven’t got a coach who’s built a style that’s unique to us and we’ve seen coaches from all around Europe come and input their styles into our game and we’re trying to copy what they do without really developing our own style.
“My view is that we need to build an identity as an English sort of country in terms of what our style of play is and let English coaches flourish, and St George’s Park was set up to do that.”