The Time Is Right for Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger to Become England Manager

In December 2011, I interviewed Gareth Southgate at his office inside Wembley Stadium overlooking the north London skyline.

At the time, after having spent three years in charge of Middlesbrough, he was now the Football Association’s head of elite development, and so I naturally asked if he had any ambitions to become the England manager in the future.

“That is a job for someone with a massive amount of experience,” he told me. “And so to do that you would have to go away and manage at club level for a long time, and get European experience, too. That would be a long, long way off.”

Five years later Southgate is now the England manager, albeit on an interim basis for the next four games, but he has added none of the experience he suggested he or any other candidate would need.

In the intervening period Southgate has not managed a club and instead remained inside the FA’s bubble by taking charge of the England under-21 side for the last three years. 

Southgate is a good man, and he may still develop in to a good manager, but he has done nothing to deserve becoming England manager, other than already being on the FA’s payroll.

He was also honest enough to admit to me that his three years in club management at the Riverside had been a “failure” because, ultimately, it had finished with Middlesbrough being relegated from the Premier League at the end of the 2008-09 season.

But Southgate is also an astute man, and what he said a manager would need to guide England remains true: a vast amount of experience at both club and European level.

This is not Southgate himself, and nor was it Sam Allardyce, who had experience at club level, but almost nothing in Europe, and had never managed in the Champions League.

There is, however, a manager in the English game who can boast of having all of this experience, and is by far the best candidate to become England manager: Arsene Wenger.

For most of the 20 years Wenger has managed in English football he has been an obvious candidate …

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