Could the FA really shoot for the stars and go for Pep Guardiola as England manager?

Appointing six-time Premier League winner would be most ambitious FA project since the governing body rebuilt Wembley

When it comes to the next England manager could the Football Association shoot for the stars? If so, there is only one man in the conversation – the great coach of his generation and six-time Premier League winner, Pep Guardiola. Appointing him would be the most ambitious FA project since the governing body acquired, demolished and rebuilt Wembley.
After the meltdown of the Lee Carsley interim show at Wembley on Thursday night, the options are narrowing rapidly. The two men in charge of the FA – John McDermott, the technical director, and Mark Bullingham, the chief executive – have not started interviewing alternative candidates. Mauricio Pochettino and Jurgen Klopp have new jobs. Eddie Howe is entrenched at Newcastle and determined to win his power struggle there. Graham Potter has said, thus far, that he wants a club job, although that may be because he senses a rejection coming from the FA.
Thomas Tuchel is available and would certainly represent an elite-level appointment but even he cannot claim to be the leading man of the era.
That, of course, is Guardiola. His current contract expires at Manchester City at the end of the season. Next summer will also mark the departure from City of director of football Txiki Begiristain, the man who originally championed Guardiola the coach and variously became his great collaborator, friend and expert recruiter. Guardiola has conquered the domestic game in Spain, Germany and England. He will be 54 in January. The Catalan has long said that he wants to coach an international team.
That does not seem to be Spain, for whom he won Olympic gold and 47 caps as a player. His obsession as a child was with Brazil, and their famous yellow jersey. He grew up with the great Brazil side of the early 1980s which should have won the Spain World Cup in 1982. An 11-year-old Guardiola was living just one hour’s drive from where Brazil played their second group stage games in Barcelona, at the former Espanyol stadium.
But England remains one of the last epic quests of world football. Is there a coach who can finally end the sequence of tournament failure? The FA has tried to throw money at the problem in the past, with the appointments of Sven-Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello – both of whom took spending on the England manager’s salary to new levels. The FA would have done the same in 2006 with the Brazilian World Cup winner Luiz Felipe Scolari, had he not turned it down at the last moment.
In all cases the view was that to solve the problem of England tournament failure, one simply just had to spend enough on the right manager. Unlike Guardiola, neither of England’s 21st century overseas managers had managed in English football, or seemed to know much about it, before they joined the FA. Guardiola is believed to earn around £20 million a year at City. In its most recent financial results for the year ending July 31, 2023, the FA announced a turnover of £481 million of which £80 million went on salary costs.
Those costs will have included Gareth Southgate’s salary of around £5 million, although Guardiola’s would add considerably more. He may accept that moving to international football would require him to lower his expectations in that regard. Aside from the Middle East, there is no national association that could spend the same as a top Premier League club. Not that Guardiola would ever be cheap for the FA. As a not-for-profit institution that receives public money and ploughs all revenue back into football at all levels, spending is always a sensitive point.
There are many more questions as to the effectiveness of Guardiola’s approach at international level, and all the other issues that come with it. But his appointment would certainly remove the pressure from the FA hierarchy. A name so big it would drown out all concerns about suitability and also those of us who feel the England manager should be English in order to preserve what makes international football different.
These are all decisions that Bullingham and McDermott face before Christmas. Carsley’s interim reign could well go into the March international break. The defeat by Greece raises the prospect of England not finishing top of their Nations League group and thus being in the play-offs for that competition in March. In which case World Cup qualifying will begin in September. It may do so either way if England are drawn in the smaller group of four for Uefa qualifying at the draw in December.
The 2026 World Cup finals, across three huge countries, will be a challenge to win for even the biggest European countries. Two years later will come Euro 2028, played in Britain and Ireland, and a point at which England will surely have another strong chance of winning a trophy. Home advantage, a promising generation coming into their prime years, and for some of those players the experience of having reached the two previous European Championship finals could all be key.
The FA will again be under huge pressure. The next World Cup will mark 60 years on from 1966. The governing body will also know that when finally England do win a trophy, no one will be grumbling about the cost.