Watching Match Of The Day 2 this evening I couldn’t help thinking about Scotland’s recent failure to qualify for the World Cup. In many of the articles I read on the subject the failure was put down to the failure of Scottish football to produce as many world class footballers as it did in the golden years of the 70s & 80s, when players like Kenny Dalgliesh were as good as any in the world.
The reason that this struck me as strange was because whilst the Scots may no longer be able to produce great footballers, they still seem to provide a pretty solid stream of decent managers for the Premier League, with Sir Alex Ferguson foremost amongst them. With England’s victory against Croatia bringing qualification for next year’s tournament in South Africa, but under an Italian manager, it got me wondering who produces the best managers.
So, the table below shows points totalled by managers of different nationalities in the Premier League so far this season. I realise that it’s early doors, as the pundits like to say, but it certainly seems to suggest that there’s no reason for us to employ another foreign manager, whilst it suggests the Scots should start sending all their players straight to Managers’ School.
- England = 38
- Scotland = 25
- Italy = 19
- Wales = 19
- Spain = 15
- N. Ireland = 9
- France = 6
- Ireland = 4
But of course, that’s not the whole picture, because this would only be a vaguely valid table if each nationality had an equal number of managers, which they don’t.
So below you can see the number of points managed so far, divided by the number of managers from that country (with the number of managers in brackets):
- Italy = 9.5 (2)
- Wales = 9.5 (2)
- N. Ireland = 9 (1)
- Spain = 7.5 (2)
- Scotland = 6.25 (4)
- France = 6 (1)
- England = 5.4 (7)
- Ireland = 4 (1)
Hmmm, maybe we won’t get rid of Capello just yet, especially as I’ve classified Wolves’ manager Mick McCarthy as Irish (as that’s who he played for internationally), but if I’d assigned him to his country of birth (England) we’d have dropped to 5.25 points per manager.
Table football image by jonboy mitchell on flickr