Ste McGovern
Sam Allardyce is still unhappy about foreign managers getting jobs at Football League clubs and he wants everyone to know about it.Â
The former Everton and England manager made a number of claims without basis this week as he made a familiar argument against English teams hiring managers from outside Britain.
“It is bewildering the amount of top quality coaches or managers in this country who are sitting without getting a job or not even getting an interview at an Oldham or a lot of the Championship clubs who are now going for a foreign coach,” Allardyce told TalkSPORT.
“That then evolves around a first team coach who comes from abroad, a reserve team coach who comes from abroad and then four or five people of the same nationality as the manager follow which is extremely worrying for this country in terms of our development of young coaches and young managers.
“The FA spend any amounts of millions to qualify us but we then don’t get a say in where we get our jobs from. There are 72 managers in the Football League and 72 first team coaches and I bet the percentage is running at 35 per cent or 40 percent who are run by a foreign coach.
Allardyce then pointed to the lack of British-born owners of clubs in the Premier League as a key factor in this development.
“The Premier League is an international league played in England. I think David Sullivan, Mike Ashley and the guy from Huddersfield, three owners. We have five managers who are British.”
There are in fact eight clubs with owners from Britain, but that didn’t stop Allardyce making his point.
“So it is becoming ever so more difficult to choose your career as an Englishman in your own country.
“If you are a coach, for me, you will have to look abroad the way it is going now.”