For the second time in four days Lee Carsley maintained a careful ambiguity throughout his post-match press conference, repeatedly asked to clarify a comment that he made, and never quite giving a firm or simple answer on whether he wanted to be the next England manager or not.
On Thursday night at Wembley it was Carsley saying that after November’s international break he would “hopefully be going back to the under-21s”. This led to plenty of follow-up questions asking for Carsley to clarify his intentions. Does he actually not want the top job? Would he really rather be coaching the under-21s than the seniors in 2025 and beyond? Carsley backtracked enough to return to an ambiguous position, or at least to leave people guessing whether he actually meant what he said. The questions continued in his pre-match press conference on Saturday night. Carsley stayed on the fence.
On Sunday night in Helsinki’s Olympic Stadium, Carsley was speaking to ITV after overseeing a 3-1 win which did at least get England’s Nations League campaign back on track. Carsley said at the end of the interview that “this job deserves a world-class coach who has won trophies, been there and done it”.
Finally, a moment of clarity. For a few minutes this felt like the silver bullet that the ‘hopefully’ comment had not been. Carsley’s comments seemed to effectively withdraw his hat from the ring. If Carsley thought the next England manager must be a “world-class coach” then surely that would mean the end of his candidacy.
Well, not quite. Again Carsley was quizzed on whether he meant what he said, and whether he was in fact confirming that he would not be a candidate. Would Athens next month be the final voyage of HMS Carsball, hosting the Republic of Ireland its last game, before he returned to the under-21s and let someone else take over? Again Carsley managed to reverse away from his initial comments, although in a way that ultimately provided even less information and clarity than before.
Did his comments mean that the job was coming round too soon for him? “Definitely not… Obviously I’m not part of the process, but it deserves a top coach”. So did he want to be part of the process after the November games? “I speak to John McDermott (the Football Association’s technical director) every day, we spend a lot of time together. I definitely don’t think it’s something I should be involved with.”
When Carsley was asked whether by “world-class manager” he necessarily meant a foreign manager, he even made explicit what everyone in the room was thinking. “The point I was trying to make,” he started off, “I suppose it’s more like the ‘hopefully’ comment…” And much like after “the ‘hopefully’ comment”, Carsley looked as if he was trying to reverse away from a revelation he had made almost by accident. Asked again why he was so reluctant to commit one way or the other, Carsley said that he did not want to talk about it so much that he lost focus. He wanted to “keep an open mind”. Did this mean that people were wrong to say that he was ruling himself out of the process? “Definitely”.
As with Thursday night, it felt when Carsley walked out of the room that he had only succeeded in muddying the waters further. He is resolutely determined not to take a public view on whether he wants the England job or not, and he will at least now not face the media again until he announces his squad for his last two games, just over three weeks from now.
We could easily spend the next three weeks parsing every word Carsley has said in the past few days, putting them under the microscope to interpret what he meant or not. But it feels like a reasonable conclusion that if he genuinely wanted the job long-term he would just say so. The ambiguity makes more sense if he is trying to cover up his reluctance rather than his enthusiasm. The two slips he has made — “hopefully going back to the under-21s” and “this job deserves a world-class coach” — both point to him accidentally revealing his own thinking and then scrambling to cover it up.
If we assume that Carsley does not want the job then England will of course have to look elsewhere for their next permanent job. Even if he does in fact want the job, and he is trying to modestly cover up his ambition, no one could argue that he is a stronger candidate now than he was one week ago. Thursday’s disaster against Greece weighs far heavier on the scale than the win against Finland on Sunday night. And the sight of Carsley twice trying to reverse out of a comment he had made in a press conference suggests he does not have the media confidence and deftness of the man that he has replaced.
So how much of a problem is this for FA? The assumption certainly took hold last month that Carsley was the chosen candidate for the permanent job. Carsley never said in September that he was measuring the curtains and preparing for a long stay in the role, but he did not put quite as much distance between himself and the permanent post as he has done this week. But it was natural for people to assume that we were heading for a Carsley coronation. Even if that now looks less likely than it did.
Southgate’s resignation was three months ago now and applications for the permanent job closed on August 2 (Carsley admitted on Saturday he did not submit one, a further sign that he was never desperate to replace Southgate). This has led to plenty of questions about what exactly the FA’s closely-guarded process looks like, and what McDermott and Mark Bullingham (FA CEO) are doing to find the next manager.
The FA wants to keep this strictly confidential, although the public are not the only ones at a loss as to what is going on. Leading candidates for the job have not been interviewed and some feel that there is no real process going on at all, though it is common in recruitment processes to start with a long period of due diligence and sifting through applications before candidates are formally spoken to.
Even now, time is still on the FA’s side. Once Carsley takes the two games in November, England will not have another game until late March, five months from now. That perhaps is the new deadline by which time people will want a new manager, or, at least, an answer on who the next manager is.
Maybe in the future we will see Carsley as a means for the FA to buy itself time so that it could go about identifying and pursuing the right candidate for 2026. Maybe he could even open the door to a Pep Guardiola or Thomas Tuchel, precisely the sort of “world class coach” he spoke of in Finland. Perhaps that particular prediction of his will be borne out. But if it is not to be Carsley, there is more pressure than ever on the FA to get it right.
(Top photo: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
