Managers have been in the news again, with nationality once more a focal point. Should
English managers be given preference? Is the Premier League, as Sam Allardyce rather
bizarrely remarked, a foreign league based in England? We decided to have a look at
manager performance. So far this season, 23 managers have taken to the dug-out, but David
Unsworth, care-taker at Everton, has only taken charge of two Premier League games,
so we’ve excluded him from deliberations; likewise,
Frank de Boer’s four matches meant it wasn’t worth including him. Five of the
remaining 21 are English, or 24%, which bumps to
one third of managers, if you include Tony Pulis and Mark Hughes of Wales, coming from the Home Nations.
Ranking these 21 managers by percentage of wins in the Premier League of the games they
have managed, the list has some obvious names at the top.
The most successful English manager to sit in the dugout this season has been Craig
Shakespeare, who managed a 38.1% win percentage and 0.46 points per game. Paul
Clement is marginally more successful over time than Roy Hodgson, while Eddie Howe and
Sean Dyche prop up the table, with newly promoted Brighton’s Chris Hughton the meat in ​
their sandwich. Of course, Clement and Shakespeare have managed a lot fewer games than
Hodgson, while Howe and Dyche have overseen the same number of Premier League
matches, 86 at the time of writing. Their full records, still ranked by percentage wins,
show Arsene Wenger’s magnificent 800 games dwarfs
the next most of current active managers, Welshman Mark Hughes’ 432.
If we also look at goals for and against, Shakespeare is the only English manager to
have overseen more goals than his team conceded,
but only just. Pep Guardiola’s ratio is an
impressive 2.56:1 for goals scored versus goals conceded; at the other end, Huddersfield’s
David Wagner has the lowest ratio, 0.54:1, with seven goals conceded in two games against
Spurs and Liverpool. Eddie Howe and Sean Dyche are only 0.07 goals apart, but Dyche’s
Burnley have scored fewer and conceded fewer than Howe’s more expansive side.
Now, it could be argued that English managers don’t get the chance to run top sides, which
is why they are generally lower in the list. They’ve also accounted for a small proportion
of the total games managed by the above list
– English bosses from that 21 have taken charge
of 444 games among them of the 3279 of total games, or 13.5%, despite comprising 24% of
the list. But let’s add to that list the last six
English bosses to have overseen a Premier League game
but who are no longer employed at a Premier League club: Tim Sherwood (Villa), Harry
Redknapp (QPR), Garry Monk (Swansea), Sam Allardyce and Alan Pardew (both Palace), and
Steve McClaren (Newcastle). The list doesn’t look much better for English bosses. Sherwood
creeps in just below Shakespeare, and Redknapp, with 641 games managed, comes below
him. But, the unlucky Garry Monk aside, then there’s a gap, and Allardyce, Pardew, and
McClaren all with fairly poor records, despite a large number of games taken charge
between them. These six additions bump the proportion of
games managed by English bosses in the above list to 44%. Dyche and Howe are still at the
bottom of the list, though obviously, there are
less successful foreign managers in the last three or four seasons we’ve not looked at,
but both clubs have faith in bosses who get results
that are impressive relative to club stature. And while the argument that English bosses
don’t get the top jobs might still be true, owners
looking at precedent could see from the above list that vastly experienced English bosses
like Allardyce, Pardew, and Hodgson do not get
demonstrably better results compared to less experienced managers from abroad, even at clubs of similar stature.