The October 2024 international break will forever be remembered as the one where Lee Carsley twice got himself in a tangle after appearing to admit that he did not want the England job after all. Both times Carsley tried to scramble back onto the fence, to maintain his position of constructive ambiguity. Both times the press conference came close to farce.
Combine those two scenes with the 2-1 defeat to Greece on Thursday night and Carsley’s reputation has been permanently damaged. Athens next month will surely be his final game in charge.
Carsley was always an alluringly simple answer. How do we replace the manager England promoted from their under-21s? Well, with the current under-21 boss? How else to continue the St George’s Park culture, the England DNA helix, than with someone already steeped in it? Carsley — slightly unknown, gentle, humble, kind — could live up to Southgate’s best traits.
Or so we thought. But if the answer is not Carsley, then the FA will have to ask some bigger questions about the type of candidate they want. They may well be tempted to shop at the opposite end of the market. On Sunday night, Carsley said that England deserved “a world-class coach who has won trophies, been there and done it”. At the time, this almost sounded like an endorsement of Pep Guardiola or Thomas Tuchel, even if Carsley tried to extricate himself from the implications of it afterwards.
The sporting implications of a Guardiola appointment are obvious. Here is the most decorated coach of the modern era, a relentless winning machine who has changed how the game is played. He is as close to a guarantee of success as you can get. Consider the huge commercial profile of the 2026 World Cup and you can see why the FA might be tempted. Who would they rather have as the face of English football, wearing the FA gear in front of the eyes of the world: Carsley or Guardiola?
We can argue all day about whether Guardiola’s style would translate into international football, whether the England manager has enough time with the players to teach such a structured game, and whether Guardiola himself would want to leave City for a job that would pay him a fraction of his current salary.
But there is a simpler principle to confront here before we think about specifics — for England to appoint Guardiola would be a betrayal of the whole Southgate era. The last eight years were all about an English manager with not a lot of experience at the top level coming in and building something distinctly English. He inherited a disaster and turned it into the most successful era of the England team in modern history. It was a reminder that, even in the era of the Premier League, the English team can have an identity of its own, if only it has someone working hard to create it.
England appointing Guardiola would also challenge some beliefs of international football. People love international tournaments because they examine more than just who has the most money. They are about each country testing the limits of its football infrastructure, its players, its coaches, its ways of doing things.
As soon as one national association buys in the best manager in the world, the principles of the game are undermined. As soon as you buy in the best coach, you risk doing to international football the one thing it must avoid at all costs: turning it into club football.
In club football, the same rich teams win every year. Smaller teams have no real hope of competing unless they are bought by a hedge fund or a state. It is a game wholly for sale, one that no longer depends on who can buy in the best players and managers, but increasingly the best lawyers and accountants too.
International football is meant to be different. The paradox is that while the tournaments are sold off to the highest bidder, no questions asked, the football played in those tournaments is still gloriously priceless. Teams cannot buy a player just because they need one. They have to find a way and be imaginative with their resources.
This is not an argument against foreign managers of international teams in all instances. There are plenty of examples of foreign managers building great international teams, winning things, and connecting with people — Bruno Metsu with Senegal or Guus Hiddink with South Korea at the 2002 World Cup, Sarina Wiegman with England women’s team at Euro 2022. Not all cases are the same.
But at the very top level, buying in the best manager is a shortcut. International football is meant to be the only bit that is not directly determined by money. This is why the recent triumphs of Luis de la Fuente’s Spain and Lionel Scaloni’s Argentina were so inspiring. Here were two managers who had risen through their country’s system, who took over a good group of players, who never had to get the chequebook out, but who found a balance and a system to win. There is very little in the club game in recent years to compare with what they did.
De la Fuente’s crowning moment came in Berlin three months ago at the final of Euro 2024. His Spain side beat Gareth Southgate’s England 2-1 and Southgate resigned the next day. But while Southgate never realised his dream of winning England a major trophy, he took them to two finals and lost one on penalties and another in the last minute. He could barely have got any closer. And the FA’s decision-makers should remember that as they try to replace him.
It often felt as if the real work of Southgate was not just the tournaments, the selections, the considered press conferences and belated substitutions. It was the job of building something real, something authentically English, at the heart of what the team was trying to do. It was easy to laugh at ‘England DNA’, which Southgate and Dan Ashworth unveiled at St George’s Park almost 10 years ago. But they were the only people trying to demarcate and defend any sort of English football identity. Everyone else was just happy enough to buy it in.
The story of English football over the last 30 years has been one of its intense openness to foreign influences. That cosmopolitanism has been the root of its success. It was a league with foreign players, then managers, then owners and now fans. It is no longer new or interesting to call the Premier League an international competition staged in England, although it is even truer now than it ever has been before. And it has certainly made for a brilliant product at times, producing great teams and stories.
But it is not the route to international success. Southgate was one of the few people to realise this, and one of the very few to make the case in public. He tried to build something new, to create an England identity and England team that was more than just “an add-on” to English football, as he liked to put it. It was something with its own traditions (like the legacy caps), its own sense of meaning and its own way of playing. He wanted a culture that the players and the fans could all share in together. He wanted something unifying in our disaggregated national life. Southgate built this out of nothing, out of the rubble of 2016, and the way the public connected with it suggested that they were longing for this too.
All of that hard work, rebuilding an English identity for the England team, would go out of the window if the FA appointed Guardiola. Rather than sticking with the hard but important work of international football, the FA would simply be swallowing the easy logic of club football outright.
Why try to build a distinctly English identity when the Premier League imports it all for us? Why create anything when you can just buy it straight in? And why go to the next World Cup with a coaching staff you have developed yourself, the product of your systems and pathways, when you can install the man who has won everything already all over the world?
England have done this before, appointing Sven-Goran Eriksson in 2001 and Fabio Capello in 2007. Neither of them had remotely the same grounding in English football that Guardiola has, it should be said. Guardiola has lived and worked here for almost nine years now. He has won six Premier League titles, two FA Cups and four League Cups. He knows more about Rico Lewis, Phil Foden, Jack Grealish, Kyle Walker, John Stones and even Cole Palmer than Southgate, Carsley or anyone from the FA. When the FA advertised this job, it said that being English was not a criterion, but knowing English football was. Guardiola does tick that box.
And yet despite that, it still does not sit right. Appointing Guardiola would be to give up on the work that defined Southgate, the work to build an authentically English football identity, the work that underpins the international game. It would be a triumph of financial muscle, a big brand win for Wembley, for the Three Lions.
It would be a good day to be an FA commercial partner, assuming they qualify for the next World Cup — but it would come at a cost. It would transform the England team into just another club. The England team turned into something else under Southgate but so much of the meaning would dissipate. Would that be worth the upgrade on Carsley?
(Top photos: Getty Images)
