Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia – British coaches are everywhere, reports Gavin Willacy. And if you’ve ever wondered what happened to Gus Caesar, read on
If the current trend of importing highly talented Chinese players in to the English Premier League continues, there will soon be more Asians earning a living playing football in the UK than there will Brits in Asia. But although the number of ex-pats on the pitch in the Orient is diminishing, British coaches are still much in demand.
An Englishman you’ve never heard of who carries the football hopes of a nation of one billion people? That’s Stephen Constantine, as Dan Brennan explains
If the FA’s decision to make the FIFA Pro Licence a mandatory qualification is set to send managers up and down the country scrabbling for their revision notes, one man who won’t be suffering pre-exam nerves is Stephen Constantine. On paper, at least, Constantine is probably the most qualified British coach around. The FIFA A Licence and Full Badge Licence already feature on a managerial CV that runs to several pages, and he expects the Pro Licence to follow. At 40 he is one of the youngest coaches to sit on the FIFA instructors’ panel and is the only Englishman.
Could this be the end of the road for Oldham Athletic? Steve Ragg explains how a promising season suddenly went so wrong
From the brink of promotion to the edge of extinction in what seems like no time at all. While hopes of Division One football died with the play-off defeat at QPR, Oldham Athletic may be killed off altogether if a solution to our latest crisis isn’t found very soon.
No longer will ageing players be able instantly to become Premiership managers: soon you will need proper FA and UEFA qualifications, as Ryan Lovejoy reports
During his time as the Football Association’s Technical Director, Howard Wilkinson pushed through proposals which will soon bring England into line with the rest of Europe. By 2003-04, each Premiership manager must hold an FA Coaching Diploma or a UEFA Professional Licence. In 2010-11, the Pro Licence, UEFA’s most-esteemed qualification, which takes 240 hours to complete, will be a requirement.
After Graham Taylor’s resignation as Aston Villa manager, David Wangerin looks back at the ups as well as downs of a man who more than once took a job too far
Graham Taylor’s hasty departure from Aston Villa has in all likelihood ended a coaching career spanning five decades. To many, that career will live in a sort of infamy, largely due to the shortcomings he exhibited as England manager a decade ago which led to the team’s failure to qualify for USA 94. But to others, his greatest blunder came not with the national teams he selected, the tactics he deployed, or even the results he failed to deliver, but in allowing himself to become the subject of that fly-on-the-wall television documentary for, as it turned out, the benefit of a rather bitter and recriminatory audience. Within a worryingly short time, “Do I not like that” became a kind of catchphrase for ineptitude, the TV programme an inadvertent testimonial for the Peter Principle of a man rising to the level of his own incompetence.