English football needs a CEO factory

One of the top leadership roles in the UK got filled on Wednesday with the announcement that Thomas Tuchel will be the new manager of the England men’s football team. The news prompted a wave of coverage about the appointment of a German to the role, including a back-page headline from the Daily Mail that read: “A dark day for England.”

But Tuchel has a world-class pedigree. He has managed Borussia Dortmund, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), Chelsea and Bayern Munich, four of the biggest football clubs in Europe. At Chelsea he won the Champions League in 2021, something no English manager has managed to do. Indeed, none of the leading English candidates for the job – Eddie Howe, Graham Potter and Lee Carsley – have even won a major trophy. 

If this was indeed a dark day for England, it was less about the appointment of Tuchel and more about the lack of credible English candidates.

The gulf between the number of top English coaches in football compared to other top European countries is staggering. If the Spain job became vacant the candidates would include Pep Guardiola, who won the Premier League with Manchester City, Mikel Arteta, who came second with Arsenal, and Unai Emery, who came fourth with Aston Villa. Meanwhile, Spaniard Luis Enrique won Ligue 1 with PSG and Xabi Alonso won the Bundesliga in Germany with Bayer Leverkusen. Yet the Spanish job isn’t about to become vacant, because Spain won Euro 2024 with Luis de la Fuente as coach, a man who has spent the past decade coaching the Spanish youth teams and being promoted through the national system until he got the top job. 

The lesson here for English football – and for any organisation – is that you need to develop and train the leaders of the future, just as you do with players. If you don’t, there simply won’t be any. 

There is a lot that business can learn from sport – more than we still realise. In our latest podcast episode, Dr Mark Slack, the co-founder of CMR Surgical, talks about recognising the need for business leaders to get a coach after seeing golfer Sir Nick Faldo, who was at the time world number one, working with one. “If you're that good and you can still have a coach, then a coach should be good for anybody everywhere,” Slack says.

Slack also talks about how his promising athletics career as a youngster gave him the discipline needed to succeed in business. “Do the basics well and everything follows on afterwards,” he says. 

The lack of English football coaches is an example of how sport can learn from business. The business world has recognised the importance of succession planning for years. I don’t mean the box-ticking succession planning of FTSE 100 companies either, where a list of potential options is drawn-up. I mean businesses actively training and developing leaders of the future so they can be chief executives.