Could "The Great EFL Championship Manager Hunt" involve GBE?
Southampton, Norwich City, Swansea City and West Bromwich Albion all need new permanent managers for the forthcoming EFL Championship season...
There will be a number of clubs in the domestic system who will not only be looking to recruit new players over the summer, but new staff also.
The headline staff member for the vast majority of clubs is always the manager, or head coach. It is often this member of staff who is seen as responsible for progress in first team performance, or, more accurately and realistically, the first team results, and, as such, is often the person who pays the price for underperformance on the pitch.
There are sets of rules for the immigration of managers coming into the UK post-Brexit. The basics of those rules can be found on one of the early articles on this site, a refresh might be required for those who missed that the first time round, so it is embedded here.
GBE for Managers & Backroom Staff
"I can confirm I will not join Barnsley FC because of the (permit) disaster.”
In this piece we will be looking into what has happened with head coaches (I will use this term moving forwards to mean both manager and head coaches) since the Brexit rules were enforced, and trying to deduce whether or not it has been a positive move to go abroad for a head coach appointment.
Southampton, Swansea City, West Bromwich Albion, Norwich City, and the League One bound Cardiff City, all have confirmed vacancies at the moment, and all clubs have had a mixture of foreign and domestic appointments over the last few seasons. These jobs are enticing for a whole range of potential candidates, so is there any indication in the data as to what could happen or what should happen?
What has happened in head coach appointments post-Brexit?
It is always a hot topic to discuss the rate of managerial dismissals in the modern game.
It is an interesting phenomenon when you're doing some research for a project that calls for a delve into the history books. The life of a manager has always been one under pressure, read “Living on the Volcano” by Michael Calvin for a detailed account of this, but they did often get much longer in the job to prove themselves. Spells of three or more years in charge were common, even taking a club down often wasn't grounds for dismissal, and it is interesting to see how often that manager actually did manage to bring them back up.
However, we are not here to discuss or solve whether managers should get longer or why patience might be at an all-time low, that is a whole other blog post, but the image below sets out the situation of managerial appointments post-Brexit.
The years in this figure are by calendar year as the Brexit rules began to apply to managers on January 1st 2021. So, the 2025 figures only cover from January to April 28th.
The emerging pattern though is that the Championship is the EFL league that is seeing the highest number of appointments per year, averaging almost two appointments per month in 2022 and 2023.
The Premier League has fewer clubs at 20, rather than 24, but still, their figures are much less than any of the EFL leagues.
In terms of how the jobs breakdown between domestic and non-domestic appointments, the table below splits this between the last three years before Brexit, and then post-Brexit to see how the GBE rules have changed things in managerial choices.
If The FA and the Home Office thought that the stringent GBE rules (see linked article above for the details) would see a resurgence in British managers being appointed to the top jobs in the country, I have bad news for them.
The trend towards foreign head coaches has only strengthened post-Brexit. The percentage of foreign appointments to the head coach role has increased by over 5% post-Brexit, with 57% of positions filled by non-domestic head coaches since January 2021.
This trend does not continue down the leagues though. The EFL has seen a higher domestic percentage of domestic appointments than previously, but not by much. In truth, not many non-domestic appointments were made pre-Brexit, especially in Leagues One and Two, and the Championship ratio has remained around 70%-30% domestic appointments.
It is interesting to see this because one has to suspect that the FA GBE rules were written and put in place to offer an element of protection to the domestic coaches. Whilst they haven't been able to promote British coaches into the PL jobs, they have at least, so far, given opportunities for domestic coaches to be head coaches of EFL clubs.
The question then becomes, is there a discernable difference in end results when appointing domestic or non-domestic head coaches? And how would we potentially advise the Championship clubs looking to fill their vacancies?
Points per match
Assessing the success of a managerial reign is a nuanced and multi-faceted study. It is impossible to measure by only one metric and each individual case should be built around the specific factors that have affected that job.
Indeed, I tried to go into depth about the assessment of a managerial reign in an old blog post from 2022 reflecting on Tony Mowbray's reign at Blackburn Rovers. I have linked that here if this piques your interest:
https://andywatsonsport.wordpress.com/2022/05/12/assessing-football-management-did-tony-mowbray-do-a-good-job-at-blackburn-rovers/
Having said all that, when attempting to assess a high number of appointments we need a more universal measure. It is relatively easy to get a manager’s points-per-match record, which, when the industry is built on results and a head coach tends to live or die by the results that they achieve, it seems a fairly acceptable way to compare success in managerial reigns.
From this point onwards we will solely look at Premier League (PL) and EFL Championship (CH) appointments because they supply a more relevant sample.
The chart above takes all of the appointments made in the PL and CH post-Brexit and averages out the points-per-match achieved by the individuals within that cohort. It is separated out by domestic and non-domestic managers, and we can see that non-domestic managers tend to achieve a higher PPM, especially in the Premier League.
The difference in the Championship is fairly negligible, which is fairly encouraging for domestic managers, but there are some obvious issues here outside of pure managerial ability that could be creating this imbalance.
Non-domestic managers are often, not always, appointed by clubs who have a decent budget, this is even more so the case in the Premier League. It is well-known that budget is an exceptionally strong indicator of success, so those clubs with the larger budgets will often garner a higher PPM. Whilst this often attracts better managers, so there is a meritocracy of a kind, often the judgement of who makes a good manager is fairly subjective and something of a self-fulfilling prophecy when the “best” managers often are gifted the jobs at the highest budget teams.
The budget differences aren’t as extreme in the Championship, which contributes to the lower difference between the leagues, which, of course, also means that individual head coaches can potentially make a bigger difference.
Looking at the most successful individual appointments post-Brexit by PPM it is slightly overwhelming how many of them are non-domestic appointments, six of the top seven. We should state here that the likes of Mikel Arteta and Pep Guardiola were appointed prior to January 2021 so won’t be in this sample.
Indeed, this is a nice bit of promo for one Mr. Scott Parker, who fills the top two domestic slots by himself. Also for Eddie Howe as the only member of the top ten who is domestic and appointed by a Premier League club.
What is obvious and clear here is that all of these appointments are for either top Premier League clubs or for top Championship clubs. That isn’t to say that the managers here didn’t do a good job, Arne Slot has clearly been an excellent appointment, but could a domestic manager have replicated Enzo Maresca’s job at Leicester last season? Potentially. Indeed, Parker has pretty much done that with Burnley, and, to an extent, Bournemouth as well.
Looking at the opposite end of the spectrum, there are the least successful appointments by PPM. Kolo Toure is classed as domestic as he has had settled status in the UK for a long time and came through the domestic coaching programme.
The majority of these appointments were attempts from clubs to avoid relegation from their league, but didn’t really work.
The majority are also domestic, but it does also show that non-domestic appointments don’t always work out. Xisco Munoz was almost a disastrous appointment at Sheffield Wednesday and Markus Schopp failed to match the level required.
There is a core here of experienced managers who were appointed to firefight, Ranieri, Hodgson, and McCarthy, and this didn’t work at all this time around. Thankfully, that is not what we are looking to do here though, as head coaches that are appointed this summer should have a good amount of time to bed in and set themselves up for the season.
We have identified a couple of issues using pure PPM as a barometer for success, but there are one or two ways to adjust the measure.
PPM Impact
We are looking for impact from our new managers. We want them to earn more points in the league than their previous incumbents, and this is something that we can look back and measure within our chort of previous managers.
There are a couple of rules that need to be made clear with these calculations. The impact is measured by taking the previous permanent head coach’s PPM value and then finding the difference between that and the new appointee. In this cohort we required the previous incumbent to be also appointed post-Brexit, to have been managing at the same level as the new person (i.e. both reigns in the Championship) and to have had managed for at least five league matches.
This is one metric in which there seems to be a clear winner. When appointing a non-domestic manager in the Championship there seems to be a more regular positive impact on points-per-match than when a domestic manager is appointed. Granted, there is a smaller sample size of non-domestic managers, less than half of the domestic sample size, but there is a sizeable difference in the impact as measured by points-per-match.
Interestingly, the same difference is not felt at all in the Premier League. There appears to be an average gain of impact, but it is very small indeed for both domestic and non-domestic managers alike.
When looking at the most impactful appointments by points-per-match it becomes easy to see why it seems as though Championship non-domestic appointments have done well in this investigation.
Danny Rohl and Marti Cifuentes can barely be separated by any metrics you come across since their arrivals into the Championship in late 2023, and their transformative effects are well demonstrated here.
Of course, to have such a big impact means that these managers are often coming in following very difficult spells for the club, many of which we saw in a chart earlier. Xisco Munoz was Danny Rohl’s predecessor at Sheffield Wednesday, Gareth Ainsworth was replaced by Cifuentes, and Tony Mowbray, popping up at the top of the chart here, was following Wayne Rooney’s historically bad Birmingham spell.
Two of the non-domestic managers here also followed Gary O’Neil, with Vitor Pereira and Andoni Iraola managing to improve on what O’Neil did in his spells with those clubs.
It is interesting to see Mark Fotheringham’s name here. He was following a really poor reign from a PPM perspective in Danny Schofield, and, indeed, Fotheringham was removed from his position after only a couple of months, despite his position here as the seventh best impact post-Brexit.
Arguably the best, and most impressive, job done here is by Unai Emery. Taking a team that was running at over a point a match under Steven Gerrard, but still managing to improve them by a huge amount in terms of points, but, also, achievements. He possesses the highest PPM in the chart, and in the most difficult league as well.
There are a number of poor domestic impacts, especially in the Championship, here. All of the poor impacts in the chart came as mid-season appointments, but clearly didn’t have the desired effect.
It is an interesting piece of learning though to notice that these least impactful appointments have almost all come in the middle of a season, where perhaps decision making at the strategic level is almost impossible given the amount of noise around football clubs during the fixtures being played.
The only one that wasn’t mid season was the appointment of Tim Walter at Hull City. He came straight in after Liam Rosenior, who has just extended his deal at Strasbourg to 2028, and immediately earned half a point less than Rosenior per match.
It would be fair to say that Ruben Amorim’s appointment hasn’t yet quite worked out as well as the Manchester United hierarchy might’ve liked, especially domestically.
With three of the top four being non-domestic appointees it is clear that a foreign appointment can go about as disastrously wrong as any appointment, but the averages say that it is probably the better option overall in the Championship.
You’re getting sacked in the morning!
One other thing to look at is the percentage of head coaches that eventually receive their P45 from the club.
Managers that either leave of their own accord, or are tempted away by another are usually not considered to be a failure by their own club.
Like all of the measures used, there are im[erfections with the method, but it is still interesting to note that there are a good number of non-domestic Championship coaches who are either still in their roles, or have left under different circumstances.
There is a similar percentage in the Premeir League for domestic appointees, but these managers were Sam Allardyce who managed four Leeds games at the end of their relegation season, and Roy Hodgson, who agreed a deal with Watford until the end of the season as well.
Is there any flexibility for appointing foreign head coaches?
If one of the Championship clubs in question did want to hire a foreign head coach then the evidence suggests that the answer to this question seems to depend upon where you rank in the domestic pyramid.
The following table looks into each foreign appointment of a head coach since the GBE regulations came into force, and it is unclear in some cases how the coach were able to pass the GBE regulations as they are written.
We can only assume that in the cases where the criteria haven’t been met that the candidates were successful in an exceptions panel procedure, which is, of course, both totally legitimate in the process, and perfectly valid in most cases, but there are also examples where it is difficult to understand how they were granted their GBE.
Premier League
Championship
This is especially the case in the Championship where 13 of 24 appointments don’t hit either of the main criteria of three years total management in Bands 1-5 or two years consecutive in Bands 1-5.
Foreign appointments in League One and League Two are rare. However, this isn’t necessarily for the want of trying.
Last year Barnsley tried to appoint Dominik Thalhammer before the end of the season but were thwarted by the GBE rules. Earlier this season Bristol Rovers encountered the same issue when trying to appoint Michael Wimmer, who is now manager of Motherwell. In the end, Bristol Rovers were successful in appointing Inigo Calderon who was in the Brighton system, and had played in England, so got a work permit despite not having the requisite experience as detailed in the regulations.
One unusual difference in this is Nelson Jardim. The former Newport County manager, appointed in July 2024 and only recently released, was a very unusual appointment but was clearly ratified by the FA despite him only ever having responsibility for Maritimo B, who do not play in a Band 1-5 league. He did have some time in England on his CV, as assistant at Birmingham, head of academy at Swansea, and fitness coach for Paulo Sousa at Swansea and Leicester, so it is possible that he had some kind of settled status.
The overall point is that, if you are going for a non-domestic manager, it is much easier if you can be certain that the manager does hit the criteria in the regulations, especially if you are in League One or League Two.
The question is, are there managers out there who are suitable, gettable, and talented enough to make the complications worthwhile?
This is the subject of the follow-up article to this piece, available on Friday for paid subscribers, where we complete the cycle and look into manager style as well as who fits into the regulations.