Kevin Moran then.
Thanks bida fuck he’s not alive to see us now
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A graduate of Bill Nicholson‘s famed Tottenham Hotspur academy.
Apologies for going all Derek McGrath “87% of these guys attended 3rd level” on it. Was just thinking of Cheasty’s theme from the other day where he mentioned the rugby schools having specialist coaches and nutritionists from the age of 13. Nothing like that in association football unless the Shamrock Rovers school takes off. Attracts a lot of students for TY. Even in GAA there’s real Mecca’s of sporting excellence like St Kierans, Ard Scóil Rís, St Pats of Navan and so on. No such system exists for our teenage soccer prospects. Wexford CBS seems to be the strongest soccer school in Ireland of late.
What intellectual types has English football produced?
Robbie Fowler
Frank Stapleton is an intelligent and engaging man.
Aren’t Rovers Private Schooling all their younglads in Ashfield?
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Jesus Stephen Kelly lambasted Matt Doherty after. Absolutely proper order too. I know it’s been done to absolute death here but by jaysus he is some lazy looking cunt
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Glenn Hoddle 
If buying a load of ex-council houses makes you an intellectual, then he is right up there
It’s one IQ point per council house according to the mensa adjustment table.
He’s a genius.
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I’d say Quinner is a smart enough chap too
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Frank Lampard
Harry Maguire
Pat Bamford
I wonder will Philip Quinn blame Stephen Kenny tomorrow?
Matt Doherty is getting a torrent of abuse on twitter
I’ve been telling ye for years about Doherty.
Not many in the true sense. What it did produce was formidable men, men who knew hardship and whose worldview was formed from that. Men who could lead and had an innate intelligence but also an empathy. These men were almost all from the north of England and especially the corridor from Yorkshire to north of Newcastle. That corridor is the part of England that produced people who were most like the Scots, who were the kings of football management.
Football management used to be primarily about extracting effort. Now it’s primarily about the brain. The dividing line of this change was probably somewhere in the early 1990s.
At around the same time, English football stopped producing Ye Olde English football men because the aspiring managers coming through were now products of Thatcher’s Britain and the cheap, nasty, self-centred, anti-intellectual tabloid culture that was foisted on the working class from above. They didn’t have the class solidarity that made men like Charlton, Paisley, Clough, Robson, Nicholson and Burkinshaw what they were. They didn’t have the innate decency of those men. And they definitely didn’t have the smarts.
English football was left behind because of that dearth of intelligence. The nouveau generation of “intellectual” English football coach, ie. your Eddie Howes and Graham Potters and Paul Clements etc., they haven’t the gravitas. They have no ability to lead.
Gareth Southgate didn’t have the football intellect but what he had was an old style decency and gravitas, and therefore an ability to lead. But Southgate is a fairly unique figure in modern English football management.
Gary Neville did strike me as somebody who had an innate intelligence and a gravitas and therefore an ability to lead that could have made him a very good manager, but he went down the media/business route.
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