Capello can reveal soccer’s core secrets

England could have saved themselves all the misery by naming Fabio Capello as manager 18 months ago. Imagine if, instead of anointing Englishman Steve McClaren in May 2006, the Football Association had shown up to the press conference with the Italian, and said: “He’s foreign. He doesn’t speak much English. He’s a difficult bloke. But he’s the best.” Capello won the league with all four clubs he ever managed: nine league titles in 16 seasons as a coach.

With Capello, whose appointment was confirmed on Friday, England would have qualified for the 2008 European Championships, and McClaren would still be happily winning some, losing more at Middlesbrough instead of being an international joke. But only now has the FA grasped a basic fact about football: England need a continental European manager.

A core group of continental European countries has discovered the secret of football. They are the six nations that in 1957 founded the European Economic Community, ancestor of the European Union: West Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux trio. Here are some results from the past 30 years:

●This core six has won eight European Championships and World Cups in total.

●The Brits, the former Soviet bloc, Balkans and Scandinavian countries north of the Baltic Sea, between them, have won one: Greece’s 2004 European Championship, delivered by a German coach.

●Belgium has played as many finals in this period (one) as England, Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Turkey put together.

●Europe’s only other trophy in these 30 years has gone to Denmark, which enjoys an utterly permeable border with the six core countries.

The core six shares a footballing style. Yes, Holland attacks more than Italy, but all six agree on fundamentals: that football is a rapid, physical, collectivist passing game played by athletes. Rarely does anyone dribble or punt the ball blindly like the British do. Brazil has the best footballers, but core western Europe has the best football style.

It has this for the same reason that it had the Scientific Revolution and was for centuries the world’s richest region. Western Europe’s secret is what historian Norman Davies calls its “user-friendly climate” – mild and rainy. That means the land is fertile, allowing hundreds of millions of people to co-exist in a small space.

So the people of these different nations have always been interconnected. They exchange ideas fast. The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries happened there because the region’s scientists were near each other, talking in the common language of Latin. Copernicus, Polish son of a German merchant, wrote that the earth circled the sun. Galileo in Florence read Copernicus and confirmed his findings through a telescope. So the proximity of many thinkers created intellectual ferment. Similarly, ideas on soccer today spread fast through the six core countries.

Draw a map of the nations that qualified for Euro 2008. In the land mass from Portugal in the west to Poland in the east, every country of more than 1m people, except Belgium, qualified. The nations that didn’t make it are on Europe’s margins: the Brits, most of Scandinavia, and most of Europe’s eastern edge. The farther you get from the core six, the less in touch you are with core European football. Countries on the margins have dysfunctional, indigenous soccer styles. The Greeks, for example, dribble too much. The Brits play mindless kick-and-rush.

It’s easy to remedy the problem: hire a manager from core Europe. Greece did in 2004. Poland and Russia qualified for Euro 2008 under Dutch coaches. England had their best performances since 1970 under a manager drawn from Italian football, the Swede Sven-Göran Eriksson. But then, fatally, the FA appointed an Englishman.

It did so out of “English exceptionalism”: the belief that England is an exceptional football country that should rule the world playing the English way. As the Daily Mail lamented when Eriksson was appointed: “The mother country of football, birthplace of the greatest game, has finally gone from the cradle to the shame.” But England is not exceptional. It is typical of the second-tier soccer nations at Europe’s margins.

Happily, the era of British isolationism has finished. This began in 1939 and ended in 1992-1994, with laws enforcing free movement of labour and capital in the EU, and the launch of Eurostar trains and budget airlines. The era of English managers is, therefore, over too. You wouldn’t appoint a Frenchman to manage a baseball team because the French don’t have a history of thinking hard about baseball. And you wouldn’t appoint an Englishman to manage a football team because the English don’t have a history of thinking hard about football.

Capello will most likely disappoint. All England managers do because nobody can meet the expectations generated by English exceptionalism. That is why no England manager has ever gone on to another job at the summit of football, excepting Bobby Robson’s single season at Barcelona. The main question is whether the British tabloids will get Capello before opposing teams do.

simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com

More columns from Simon Kuper