With Italy leading Belgium in their opening Euro 2016 game the dynamic of the contest became apparent. While the former is a manager without a suitable team, the latter is a team without a suitable manager. Indeed, the Azzurri’s 2-0 win was a result of Antonio Conte’s making, underlining his pedigree as an elite coach, even if his team are not quite up to the same standard.
Belgium isn’t the only team without a fitting manager at this summer’s European Championship, though. In fact, Conte is the one and only top-tier coach at the tournament. He is the only Euro 2016 manager who could command a job at an elite club, with the Italian boss already committed to joining Chelsea for next season.
So where are all the elite coaches in France this summer? European soccer’s best players are present, pulling on the jerseys of their national teams for the next few weeks, but the best of the continent’s managerial contingent are missing from international duty. Conte is the only coach who can lay claim to being his country’s best at these championships.
MORE ON EURO 2016: Sportsnet has you covered with in-depth coverage of Euro 2016 in France, which runs from June 10 to July 10.
• Match schedule || Group standings || Live scoreboard || Latest news
• Profiles: All 24 teams || History of Euro || Top 10 moments in Euro history
• Sportsnet’s predictions || 10 players to watch || 5 key group stage games
Unwritten convention perpetuates the notion that being appointed national team manager should be considered the pinnacle of any coach’s respective career. That at any given time countries take their pick of the best managerial candidates, summoning their coaching countrymen like an army during wartime.
However, that idea borrows thinking from the one that claims Europe puts forward its best songwriters and musicians for the Eurovision Song Contest every year. That might be the original concept, but that is simply no longer the case. It might be the case if Britain ever asks Adele to croon for them.
Consider who are the best coaches in the game right now and contemplate just how many of them have ever taken charge of a national team. Jose Mourinho hasn’t, neither has Pep Guardiola. Carlo Ancelotti will take his seventh job as a manager this summer following his appointment at Bayern Munich, but the Italian has yet to take stewardship of the Azzurri, or any other national team for that matter.
If Europe’s best managers were at the beck and call of the international game Arsene Wenger would have led France into Euro 2016, Guardiola would have taken over from Vicente Del Bosque and Mourinho would be Portugal coach. But they’re not, and so the continent’s national teams have to make do with what they can get. And what they can get is often substandard.
No team in France this summer makes a better case study than Belgium. While the Red Devils possess one of the most illustrious squads at the championships, with proven options in almost every position, their manager Marc Wilmots is markedly inferior by comparison.
Undeniably successful as a player, Wilmots has only ever coached one other team besides the Belgian national side—lowly Sint-Truidense of the country’s First Division. As if that wasn’t questionable enough as a resume for a national team boss, he was fired after just six months in charge. From there he was hired as Belgium’s assistant manager under Dick Advocaat and later Georges Leekens, taking over when the latter eventually departed. He got the job simply by sticking round the longest.
Wilmots is the epitome of a new type of manager who knows nothing but the international game, although Joachim Low provides the best precedent for such a breed having led Germany to World Cup glory two years ago. With so few seemingly willing to swap club for country, national teams are increasingly forced to appoint from within, giving the likes of Low a chance.
But Low is an exception, with so many in charge of teams at Euro 2016 blatantly out of their depth. Only three coaches at this tournament have actually won a league title in one of Europe’s five biggest leagues (Conte, Didier Deschamps and Vicente del Bosque) and Conte is the only one to have done so in the past six years. In fact, only six out of 24 managers have won a trophy in the past four years, with another six without any kind of honour to their name at all.
Euro 2016 can claim a certain coaching pedigree, but only of a bygone generation. Del Bosque, for instance, has won it all both as a club and national manager, but it’s been over a decade since he could claim to be at the forefront of the game. The same could be said of Roy Hodgson, who was handed the England job on the basis of how varied his career had been, rather than what he’d achieved over the course of it.
With such a stagnation in managerial options comes a stagnation in the development of international football, and indeed there is a sense that coaching at Euro 2016 lags behind anything seen at the top-end of the club game. There is a sharp disconnect between what is on the pitch and off it in France this summer.
Sportsnet’s Soccer Central podcast (featuring Thomas Dobby, Brendan Dunlop, John Molinaro and James Sharman) takes an in-depth look at the beautiful game and offers timely and thoughtful analysis on the sport’s biggest issues.