Having recently seen the debate over English coaches and the talk of Capello bringing over his Italian counterparts, I've recently heard a stat which may give a more left field explination. The stat in question is that the average manager in the English leagues has had about 1.5 jobs prior to the current one, whereas in Italy the home of big coaches such as Capello, Trappatoni and Lippi, the number is 6. Six clubs prior to the current one? It certainly shows that they have more experince, but also that they are given more chances. Juande Ramos is probabaly the best case in point for the foreign managers. Hes currently the favoured foreign coach having made Spurs more cup friendly. However he has some real managerial failures in his early career, a quick look on wikipedia shows you his prolonged managerial career; Alcoyano, Levante, Logroñés, Barcelona B, Lleida, Rayo Vallecano, Betis, Espanyol, Málaga, Sevilla, Tottenham Hotspur; this also shows you it hasnt been a normal ruote to the top and took in lots of different clubs. His spell at Betis was paticualary poor and only really won anything at Sevilla bar the Segunda league in 1999 with Vallecano. However Espanyol and then Malaga took a chance with him and then it all came together at (ironically)Betis' fierce rivals Sevilla. There are not many British managers where failure at a club has been brushed off and gone on to bigger and better things. We like meteoric success with no blemishes, the Alex Ferguson model, going from player to St.Mirren to Aberdeen to Scotland to Man Utd. He did very well at all the clubs, but nobody is perfect enough to not do badly at all their clubs. Sometimes I think we want too much from out managers, and we don't forgive nor forget. Theres many castigated managers who never get given a chance again, Glenn Hoddle is a good example, and also managers who get top jobs too early and haven't served an apprentership. Maybe if we didn't have this attitude or coaches may have more experince and in a correllation be better coaches for it. However for me this is British trait in that we don't take failure and to recover from it is something we just don't do. In other countries be it in business or cinema, many people are given lots of chances despite a rickety few moment. I suppose the difference is we see a bad time as a failure, others see it as experince. To move the argument on however another problem is that we also don't have the adventurous streak to have coaches abroard, coaches tend to always want to stay domestically or if they cant get a job here, maybe Scotland. To really further your career, maybe it might be better to coach abroard and really test yourself and further yourself as a person and a coach. Britain does have a tradition of certain coaches going abroard and coaching, probabaly starting with Jimmy hogan who inspired the fantastic Austria side of the 1920's and then put in place the infastructure for Hungary to dismantle England in the 1950's. More recently we have had Tony Adams spend some time in Holland with Feyenoord, but he quickly came back. The real problem is we don't appreciated what Englishman abroard do and we sometimes have a almost snobbish attitude in most printed press to these English coaches abroard. Peter Whithe, famous for scoring the winning goal in the 82 European cup final for villa, has been coaching around the south east asia area with some success but you wouldn't know unless you really looked, and even closer Bobby Houghton has had a sensational record around the world, Houghton was the architecht behind Malmo's great European Cup runs in the early 80's when they lost to Clough's Forest. If you look at Houghton's career however he has been around the world with clubs since 1971; Hastings United, Maidstone United, Malmö FF, Ethnikos Piraeus, Bristol City, Toronto Blizzard, Al-Ittihad, Örgryte IS, Malmö FF, Al-Ittihad, FC Zürich, Colorado Rapids, China, Uzbekistan, India. Surely hes deserving of a domestic job but we are very snootish about coaches who don't coach in 'our leagues' and don't know 'our football' as if its different. Hopefully the coach I'm mentioning will change this snootish attitude which has exsisited since Jimmy Hogan, Roy Hodgson. Hes credited with Houghton in transforming Swedish football and his career record has taken in lots of european football; Halmstads BK, Bristol City, Örebro SK, Malmö FF, Neuchâtel Xamax, Switzerland, Internazionale, Blackburn Rovers, Internazionale, Grasshoppers, F.C. Copenhagen, Udinese, United Arab Emirates, Viking FK, Finland, Fulham. This is a guy whos coached Inter, Udinese and the Swiss national team, a job that Ottmar Hitzfeld is going to after the Euro's this year. But English clubs have only considered him for Blackburn, where he didnt have a good spell, so after that we just labelled him a Failure and not touched him again until Fulham were in their hour of need. How many ex-Inter coaches could Fulham have got? Its only because of this snobbishness really that he has probabaly come to Fulham and I hope he keeps them up as they are playing good passing football (like another world compared to Sanchez) and might prompt managers to move abroard, so its not just Hodgson or Toshack who move abroard in the next generation of managers. The current finnish manager is also an Englishman, Stuart Baxter who is now carrying on the fine tradition of Englishman in Scandanavian football, and has also been manager of the South African national team, and gone to the J-League.