For anyone in the English football media tempted to humour Giggs in his self-serving delusions (probably all of them, to be honest), Antonio Conte is the best comparison, and an especially instructive one given what he’s doing with Chelsea this season. A highly-decorated player (five Serie A titles, Champions League winner in 1996, runners-up medals at both the World Cup in 1994 and European Championship in 2000), his first three years in management were nonetheless spent in Italy’s Serie B with Arezzo and Bari. When he did finally get a job in the top-flight it was with perennial strugglers Atalanta, then back to another Serie B club in Siena. Those four unfashionable clubs cover roughly his first five years as a manager, and when a big job finally did present itself, it was at the club with which he had excelled as a player, Juventus.
Personally, I would be absolutely
ecstatic if Manchester United were to sack Mourinho in the morning and “give it Giggseh”, but in the same way that the likes of AC Milan or Inter (or Juventus, for that matter) weren’t exactly beating a path to Conte’s door in the early years of his management career, no other club, besides the one at which he is a playing legend, owes Giggs so much as a single solitary thought until he proves his competence and talent, somewhere, as a manager.
With that said, I’m sure that for Arezzo and Bari having a Champions League-winning Italian international taking the reins was enough. Even if Conte wasn’t always successful (initially sacked at Arezzo, won Serie B with Bari, sacked by Atalanta, promotion with Siena), the prospect of having a “name” in the dugout to attract a better calibre of player and a bit of profile to the club probably figured into their thinking.
Well there are plenty of similar opportunities waiting for Giggs in the lower leagues of English football. A quick internet search would tell him that 18 of the Championship’s 24 managers are currently British or Irish. Of the 6 exceptions, one is Jaap Stam, another highly-decorated former player who was once a teammate of Giggs’ and is taking his first steps into management at a lower level despite having over five years’ coaching experience, some of which were spent at a major club (Ajax). And lest Giggs think that he would somehow be “slumming it” in the Championship, the league is good enough for a third of the Champions League-winning managers currently active in English football (namely Rafa Benítez), and back in August, when Roberto di Matteo was still managing Aston Villa, it housed as many as
half of them (Mourinho and Guardiola obviously the others).
And it isn’t just the Championship where opportunities for British coaches are rife: 23 of the 24 coaches in both League One and League Two are British or Irish, and one of the two exceptions is from a British territory (Gibraltar). Even leaving the latter out, it means that 71 of the 92 Premier/Football League clubs in English football currently have a British or Irish manager in charge (77%), and I would wager that a high proportion of them would virtually hand Giggs the job without an interview given the profile he would bring.
But Giggs doesn’t want that. As he says himself, “if you don't get the chance, you don’t get the chance to prove what you can do and
see what you can do with a talented team.” The bit in bold says it all about what he
really means. You see, this isn’t about there being too many foreign managers in English football, this is about Giggs being handed a big job with a minimum of effort, the managerial equivalent of a baby being spoon-fed. He namechecks Paul Clement, but Giggs would probably be mortified at the prospect of spending the next 11 years of his life as Chelsea academy coach, Republic of Ireland U-21 coach and Fulham academy coach as Clement did after his retirement from playing. Instead, Giggs wants to see what he can do with a
talented team and, like English football’s very own version of Veruca Salt, he wants it
NOW (hey, we all do Ryan, but the less entitled among us just buy Football Manager).
But it doesn’t work that way
anywhere, not just in England, and that reality has little to do with the number of nationalities involved. For context, let’s look at Antonio Conte’s homeland. In Serie A, 16 of the 20 managers are currently Italian (80%), compared with the Premier League’s 7 British bosses (35%). “Haha!” Giggs, no doubt backed by the majority of the English football media, might say, “so Italian clubs give
their managers a chance!” Well yes, they do, but very rarely to ex-players with fuck all management experience who want to skip the apprenticeship and step straight into a big job. Even a cursory examination of the early managerial careers of Serie A’s current Italian incumbents makes that much obvious:
Vincenzo Montella (AC Milan): Roma under-15 team;
Gian Piero Gasperini (Atalanta): Juventus youth teams for a decade, Crotone;
Roberto Donadoni (Bologna): Lecco, Livorno;
Massimo Rastelli (Cagliari): Juve Stabia, Brindisi, Portogruaro, Avellino;
Rolando Maran (Chievo): Cittadella, Brescia, Bari, Triestina, Vicenza, Varese;
Davide Nicola (Crotone): Lumezzane, Livorno, Bari;
Giovanni Martusciello (Empoli): Empoli youth team, Empoli assistant manager;
Andrea Mandorlini (Genoa): Manzanese, Triestina, Spezia, Vicenza;
Stefano Pioli (Inter): Bologna youth team, Chievo youth team, Salernitana, Modena;
Massimiliano Allegri (Juventus): Aglianese, Real SPAL, Grosseto, Sassuolo;
Simone Inzaghi (Lazio): Lazio youth teams for six years;
Maurizio Sarri (Napoli): Stia, Faellese, Cavriglia, Antella, Valdema, Tegoleto, Sansovino, Sangiovannese, Pescara, Arezzo, Avellinol;
Luciano Spalletti (Roma): Empoli;
Marco Giampaolo (Sampdoria): Pescara assistant coach, Giulianova assistant coach, Treviso assistant coach, Ascoli;
Eusebio Di Francesco (Sassuolo): Virtus Lanciano, Pescara, Lecce;
Luigi Delneri (Udinese): Opitergina, Pro Gorizia, Partinicaudace, Teramo, Ravenna, Novara, Nocerina, Ternana.
The jobs listed above don’t represent the entire breadth of these managers’ experience prior to their current top-flight roles, just their respective baptisms into management. Some apprenticeships (certainly Sarri’s and Delneri’s) were longer and more gruelling than others, and bearing in mind that some of these clubs, like Crotone, Empoli and Sassuolo, are only relatively recent additions to Serie A and hardly represent the kind of job that Giggs covets, perhaps it would be fair to say that some are still being served. Regardless, with only two possible exceptions (Inzaghi and Montella), it would be fair to say that none of these men learned their trade at glamorous clubs.
Inzaghi and Montella, Serie A winners and Italian internationals both, were fortunate in that they were thought of very highly at Lazio and Roma respectively, and Montella’s situation, where he coached Roma’s under-15 team for a season or two before getting the Roma job on an interim basis after Ranieiri was sacked, is quite similar to what happened at Manchester United when Moyes left (although, and I admit to being ignorant on this, did Giggs actually do
anything in a coaching capacity at Old Trafford aside from sitting next to the manager and occasionally being glowered at by Van Gaal, even at under-15 level?). In the vast majority of cases, however, the road to the top in Italy has gone through Serie C1, Serie C2 and places like Aglianese and Sangiovannese.
I’ve picked Italy merely to illustrate the fact that the man who currently looks certain to lead his side to the Premier League title as early as February is Italian, but it’s a pattern likely to be repeated in leagues the world over. Carlo Ancelotti started off in Serie B with Reggiana, Jürgen Klopp with Mainz in the second tier of German football (where he had played virtually his entire career, incidentally, and may have found it more difficult to get that job otherwise), Thomas Tuchel with FC Augsburg’s reserves, Unai Emery with Lorca Deportiva and Almería, and so on. Going back further, Ferguson had St. Mirren and Italy's last World Cup-winning manager, Marcelo Lippi, managed the Sampdoria youth team, Pontedera, Siena, Pistoiese, Carrarese, Cesena and Lucchese before he got a sniff of the big time with Atalanta and cash-strapped Napoli in the early-nineties. Even Zidane with Castilla and Pep Guardiola with Barcelona B has to serve
some kind of managerial apprenticeship before they were given a big job. This is to say nothing of the histories of the Premier League’s managers already outlined by these posts:
And this is the first club(s) of those 7 managers...
Let's have a look where the foreign managers all started their careers in full time management
All of which is to say, bluntly, that Giggs is full of shit. Having never managed a team at any level, he has one very simple solution open to him: if he finds a foreign manager sitting in the dugout at a club he wants to manage, be better than that foreign manager and prove it. In a country which suddenly seems fucking
obsessed with what foreigners are bringing to society, the irony is that all Giggs has to do is work harder and be more productive. Do that and the Manchester United job will be his someday,
for sure (and the same will likely be true for Steven Gerrard at Liverpool one day). But nah, fuck that, complaining about foreigners to a sympathetic media in post-Brexit Britain is so much easier.
