THE appointment of Thomas Tuchel as manager of the England men’s team has caused a stir.

It has been criticised as an abandonment of English football identity. A betrayal of St George and the English DNA forged at his football Park in Staffordshire.

Such criticism forgets how football developed as a global game in the first place, and national team football has always been open to positive international influences and the sharing of ideas beyond borders.

As it became increasingly unclear if England’s post-Southgate caretaker boss Lee Carsley wanted the job full-time, other names were put forward as possible successors.

The most popular of them seemed to be Pep Guardiola, the Catalan manager who represented the Spanish national team as a player and shaped much of the modern football landscape on the back of his coaching at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City.

On the back of the Guardiola links, there were rumblings about the England team needing an English manager, but when the hiring of Tuchel was announced, these sentiments went into overdrive, bordering on jingoism.

The Daily Mail called it a “dark day for England. Three Lions gamble on a German!” It was a surprise not to see an advertisement for a pull-out containing the lyrics for anti-German songs Ten German Bombers and Two World Wars and One World Cup plastered on their front page.

There is a case to say the England manager should be English that doesn’t come from a place of parochial nationalism. 

If the game is developing as is often portrayed in a country that boasts the highest-profile domestic league and a national team that has reached the final of the last two European Championships, then that development should include coaches as well as players.

In many ways, the lack of English coaching candidates for the national team is by design — a result of the system in England or Britain itself and reflects the way corporate management structures work in many industries.

For a start, it costs a lot to take coaching qualifications to the highest level. To take the Uefa A License in England costs £4,000 and the top-level Pro Licence costs £13,700.

Getting on the ladder at the bottom can be fairly easy, but climbing it is difficult, even if you are good enough to gain the qualifications and can afford to pay for them.

Being accepted onto the courses is as much an obstacle as the fee, and it favours former pros already in these circles and those privileged enough to be able to spend time effectively working for free or for little pay early on.

There are often romanticised stories of once-aspiring coaches travelling around the world taking in training sessions of some of the most revered managers in the game, but this is also a costly activity.

Then there is the catch-22 situation of needing to be at a professional club to take these coaching qualifications, but needing those same qualifications to get a job at a professional club in the first place.

This situation is not limited to English football. There are similar costs associated with getting on the coaching ladder in other countries, including Germany. 

There is a feeling that coaching at the highest level can be a closed shop for some. This in turn leads to a lack of diversity in a sport that originally grew on the back of its accessibility.

As a result, the pool of English coaches seems artificially limited. Can you have a national football identity if your pool of coaches doesn’t reflect the nation and its communities?

There are sections on the FA’s website that explain a so-called England DNA. It reads more like a corporate presentation or something you might read on LinkedIn than a football philosophy (which goes back to the managerial structures again), but there are positives beneath its PowerPoint exterior.

And a lot of those positives take their cues from modern German and Spanish football. It appears that the English FA decided it liked German-influenced out-of-possession pressing, and the possession and positional play of the Johan Cruyff-influenced Guardiola school. 

An idealistic combination of two of the most revered modern football styles.

One section on transition play reads: “Responding quickly and intelligently to a changeover in possession, will allow England teams to exploit attacking opportunities and effectively reorganise defensively when out of possession.”

An out-of-possession section adds: “England teams aim to regain possession intelligently, with a focus on winning the ball as early and as efficiently as possible.”

This echoes Jurgen Klopp’s line that counter-pressing is the best playmaker and Guardiola’s idea of winning the ball back within a certain timeframe after losing possession.

As for the possession itself, there are obvious Guardiola influences within this “DNA.”

“England teams aim to dominate possession intelligently, selecting the right moments to progress the play and penetrate the opposition,” it says.

“The future England goalkeeper will play an important role in all aspects of the in-possession playing philosophy.”

This Spanish and German influence, whether actual or just to sound good in the blurb, might be inadvertent, but if the English DNA is influenced so much by German football, why is hiring a German coach such a bad thing?

The story of the development of football across the world is one of the exchange of ideas in which England itself initially played a big role. 

The origins of the passing game, and professional football itself, lie in Scotland and the north of England. 

This was then exported around the world, and as the game developed in continental Europe, some of the key figures in the history of coaching such as Vic Buckingham and Jimmy Hogan, were English. The foundation of many tactical ideas can be traced back to them.

These ideas evolved, including at notable moments in the Netherlands, Hungary, Brazil and Argentina, among many others, before finding their way to modern-day pioneers like Guardiola and Klopp.

In many ways, the FA hiring Tuchel is a representation of English culture — a positive sporting culture that has imported as much as it has exported, but also a negative workplace culture that limits its own coaching pool and fosters exclusivity rather than accessibility and diversity.

If Tuchel’s hiring can be opposed, it could be done so on the basis that it is a product of this exclusive system, but not because he is not English.

International football has its natural, inherent limitations, especially when it comes to the choice of players, but that doesn’t mean it should be insular. 

The history of the game has been about the dispersal of the laws, interpretations of the game within them, and the sharing of ideas and cultures across borders. Test matches between groups, including sports clubs, works teams, and nations, emerged from this.

One of the reasons football is often considered “the beautiful game” is that it picks up different flavours and styles wherever it is played as a result of numerous factors, from climate to culture, and international football can be a demonstration of this diversity.

English coaches continue to have influence abroad. Steve McClaren is currently in charge of the Jamaica men’s team, while Emma Hayes coaches the United States women’s team — one of the most successful national teams in the history of international football. 

The England’s women’s team themselves won a European Championship and reached the final of a World Cup under a Dutch coach, Sarina Wiegman.

Tuchel may not achieve the same for the England men’s team, but he shouldn’t be forbidden from giving it a go simply because he’s not English.