Take a moment. This is not a concept that can easily be taken on board. Deep breaths. But what if – bear with this; it will sound ridiculous – what if the Football Association is attempting to be machiavellian and is doing it well?
Yes, this is the FA who dished out handbags to try to persuade Fifa executive committee members to vote for its World Cup bid when Russia was offering paintings from the state archive and Qatar was doing deals for a couple of dozen fighter jets.
Yes, this is the FA which, having already reneged on a deal with Germany, tried to oust Scotland’s David Will from his position as the United Kingdom’s Fifa vice-president as part of its bid for the 2006 World Cup by allegedly offering a £3.2m loan to the Football Association of Wales, leading to the resignations of the chief executive, Graham Kelly, and the secretary, Keith Wiseman.
Political cunning has not previously been a notable trait. But appointing Lee Carsley as interim England coach, while it may not quite be a scheme worthy of George Smiley or the canny 19th-century Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich, does seem an unusually astute plan.
There is an obvious criticism. Gareth Southgate’s departure after the Euros cannot have come as a huge shock to anybody, even if his contract did run until December. It was always the most likely outcome.
Therefore it’s not unreasonable to ask why the FA didn’t have a candidate lined up, why it hadn’t at least made soundings to Eddie Howe or Graham Potter or Jürgen Klopp, ready to unveil them as soon as Southgate’s farewell press conference was out of the way.
But maybe the FA had already made its mind up. Maybe the FA looked at all the available candidates and decided the best option is Carsley. International management, after all, is very different from the club game.
The club game is where most managers are judged, but few who have been successful in club football then thrive in international football. The dynamic and the demands are very different – and so are the financial rewards, which is why the idea of Klopp or another major coach at the peak of their powers taking the job seems fanciful.
At the same time, there are several examples of coaches who have stepped up from a role within the federation to succeed with the national side, from Aimé Jacquet to Joachim Löw, Lionel Scaloni to Luis de la Fuente. If that figure has worked at youth level with players he will have in his senior squad, if he understands them and has forged bonds of loyalty, so much the better.
Peter Taylor’s one game as interim manager in 2000 was a 1-0 defeat by Italy, but it had a long-term impact: he gave the captaincy to David Beckham and included six under-21 players, five of whom – Gareth Barry, Jamie Carragher, Kieron Dyer, Rio Ferdinand and Emile Heskey – would become regulars.
Carsley is making the same journey Southgate did: from under‑21s coach to interim national coach. Whether he makes that final step to be permanent manager probably depends on the next few months, less on the Nations League results against the Republic of Ireland, Finland and Greece than on the performances.
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Wherever the story sprang from that Pep Guardiola may be interested in the England job at the end of the season, it has done the FA a huge favour. The Manchester City manager is a man of great intensity, somebody who often seems exhausted by the end of a season. He has already taken one sabbatical in his career. It’s just about possible to believe he would at some point decide he could tolerate a major pay cut for a couple of years of the lower pressure of an international job, to enable himself to recharge if nothing else. Given his avowed Catalan nationalism, there is no reason to think he would hold out for Spain. He is a coach it would be worth waiting a year for.
The FA does not have to acknowledge that. It can wait and see where the speculation leads. It gets the chance to assess Carsley on the job. There is no reason to doubt his coaching ability – Anthony Gordon has described him as the best man-manager he has worked with and the side he led to the Under-21 European Championship was bright and flexible – but he has never worked in a role with such public scrutiny. The real test will be how he handles the ambassadorial side of the job, something at which Southgate excelled.
This works from a PR point of view. Imagine the reaction if Carsley, with zero club experience, had been handed a two-year contract. The pressure on that first game in Dublin next month against Ireland, the country for whom he won 40 caps, would have been enormous.
As it is, Carsley can prove his credentials in a relatively relaxed environment. If, come the end of the year, England have been promoted to Nations League Group A having played scintillating football, Carsley will be a much easier sell to the public, as Southgate was after positive early results. If it doesn’t work out, well, he was only the interim anyway: look, here’s Frank Lampard.
It doesn’t feel natural to divine clever political motives in the FA’s manoeuvrings. History suggests it’s more likely it just hasn’t found anybody and Carsley is available. But if the hope was to finesse Carsley into the job as part of some grand succession plan, this would be the best way to do it.