What happens when superstar club coaches take over national teams?

At the end of the previous decade, these were quintessential national team managers: Gregg Berhalter (U.S.), Tite (Brazil), Gareth Southgate (England), Didier Deschamps (France) and Jogi Low (Germany). Today, here's what we've got: Mauricio Pochettino (U.S.), Carlo Ancelotti (Brazil), Thomas Tuchel (England), Zinedine Zidane (France) and Jurgen Klopp (Germany). In 2019, Pochettino was managing European runner-up Tottenham, Ancelotti was with Napoli, Tuchel was working with Neymar and Kylian Mbappé at Paris Saint-Germain, Zidane was back with Real Madrid and Klopp was the defending European champion with Liverpool. Maurizio Sarri, meanwhile, had just made the jump from Chelsea to Juventus. Sarri faltered in London but just a year before was considered potentially the world's next great manager after masterminding Napoli's highest-ever point total: 91, just four behind Juventus and their seventh straight league title. His Napoli played the high-possession, high-pressing soccer that was about to conquer the continent. Sarri's ideas were at the vanguard of the sport, and midway through his season with Chelsea, he said what everyone else would eventually be thinking. "I didn't see a match in the [2018] World Cup", he said. "I don't like the national team because there isn't anything to learn. It is a usual position, every coach thinks like me. It is unusual to say it. It is impossible to arrange a team very well in 30 days. Every team in the World Cup will lose against the top-level club teams in every match". OK fine -- no one else boycotted the 2018 World Cup for tactical reasons. But Sarri's larger point was, most importantly, true: Club soccer was the pinnacle of, well, soccer, and everyone knew it. Clubs weren't held back by borders when assembling their rosters, their coaches got to coach their players every day, and the exploding broadcast revenues -- for Champions League clubs, in particular -- meant that the best players were getting coached by the best coaches. As Sarri suggested, most managers are control freaks. They want to be able to handpick the skill set of each specific player on the field, they want everyone to move in unison on the field according to their principles, and they want to fine-tune it on the training pitch day after day. Throw in the better rosters of players and generally much high pay, and, of course, all of the best managers are going to be managing club teams. But then why -- all of a sudden -- are five of the best managers in the sport managing the U.S., Brazil, England, France and Germany? And given the sudden shift in coaching quality as coaches move over from the club game, all of these big, rich countries should soon be a lot better ... right? Right?! Why club coaches are taking over national teams If you're a truly elite manager -- one of the names we're talking about right now -- then how many club jobs are actually available to you? Ones that offer a salary in the $10 million-plus range and a chance to win major trophies? There are a bunch of clubs that can offer one or the other -- smaller Premier League clubs can match the pay but not the competitive ambitions, smaller clubs in the other European leagues can offer Champions League play and narrow paths toward domestic titles but not the pay. Only a handful can provide both. In England, you've got the so-called Big Six, but with Tottenham stuck in a relegation battle for the third year running, it really has become a Big Five of Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United and Manchester City. In Spain, there's Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid. In France, there's only Paris Saint-Germain. In Germany, there's only Bayern Munich. And in Italy, well, when was the last time we saw a truly world-class manager take a job in Serie A? We've seen coaches become world-class managers in Italy, but we haven't seen one go to Italy since Antonio Conte left Chelsea for Inter Milan in 2019. So, that leaves us with 10 jobs, but really: it's fewer than that. All of these coaches have already coached some of these clubs, so they're unable to go back. And if that team happens to have an eternal rival, then you also have to lop that one off the list. On top of that, the likes of Luis Enrique at PSG, Mikel Arteta at Arsenal and Diego Simeone at Atletico Madrid have had and/or will have those jobs locked up for a long time. Who knows what the possible punishments for financial breaches could do to Manchester City for years to come. Then throw in personal taste -- Klopp, say, seems unlikely to manage mega-clubs like Real Madrid or PSG -- and the list dwindles even more. Let's say, then, there are somewhere between three to five jobs that become available across a given year. Theoretically, you're already competing with the handful of other elite, unemployed managers for those jobs -- along with the handful of lesser-known names that have produced unexpected results for smaller clubs and who crop up every year. I say "theoretically" because, well, it's unclear how many of these clubs even want to give these managers what they truly want. Remember that control Sarri was talking about earlier? You still get it on the training ground, but that's about it. Apart from Arteta and Simeone, there are no other managers at big clubs who exert the same kinds of control -- over personnel and gameplay -- that managers of the previous generation were given. They also might be the last two who ever get to do it. Clubs have increasingly pulled power away from their managers -- often even changing their job titles from "manager" to "head coach." Most of them have done a terrible job of implementing this new model, but for organizations that are approaching $1 billion in annual revenue, it makes sense to have the coach be the one who coaches the team, and someone else be the one to make the expensive, long-term decisions over what players to acquire and let leave. So, that leaves the state of things at the highest level in flux: clubs that want coaches who fit into their system versus famous coaches who cost a lot of money and want to make the system their own. This all then leads to where we are right now. Klopp, Tuchel, Ancelotti, Pochettino and Zidane all get to be the faces of soccer in Germany, England, Brazil, the U.S. and France. They have total control over what players they call into their camps. They decide how they get to play. These coaches are -- by far -- the most important people in their respective organizations. Their jobs aren't constantly at risk like in the Premier League, where the average managerial tenure lasts for less than 18 months. And since the federations don't have to follow any of the spending constraints that have been recently instituted in the club game, they're able to pay coaches competitive salaries. AC Milan can't get a hedge-fund billionaire to donate Pochettino's salary, but the U.S. Soccer Federation can -- and did, multiple times. So, do great club coaches make for great national teams? If the level of managerial quality in the international game is much lower, on average, than in the club game, then it would seem that having Klopp or Zidane as your national team manager would make an even bigger difference than it did for Liverpool or Real Madrid. We know, broadly, that most managers have an indistinguishable long-term effect from each other. But we also know the extreme ends of the spectrum are different: There's a small pool of managers who consistently improve long-term results and a small pool of managers who harm long-term results. A bunch of coaches from the make-teams-better end of the spectrum just joined a cohort that's likely filled with a bunch from the make-teams-worse end. The results, though, haven't quite matched up with that idea. Right now, the best managers outside of England are Luis Enrique of Paris Saint-Germain and Hansi Flick of Barcelona. They've each won major trophies in multiple major leagues. They've each won at least one Champions League title. And they've both done it by imposing new, distinct tactical styles wherever they want. If Barcelona and PSG play in the Champions League final next May, it will surprise no one. But guess what both managers were doing before they got their current gigs? Falling on their faces at the 2022 World Cup. Flick's Germany didn't make it out of their group, and Luis Enrique's Spain lost to Morocco in the round of 16 on penalties after controlling 77% of possession but somehow only generating one shot on target. Over Luis Enrique's four years with Spain, their Elo rating dipped slightly, and so too did Germany's under Flick's. At best, both managers failed to improve the teams they took over. More recently, Luciano Spalletti took Napoli to a shocking, thrilling and dominant Serie A title in the 2022-23 season. They won the league by 16 points after finishing third the season before. They played an aggressive, un-Italian, possession-dominant game and famously annihilated Klopp's Liverpool 4-1 in the Champions League group stages. Surprisingly, Spalletti used his cachet from Napoli's success to become the Italy manager. But for Italy, the hire was a no-brainer: who better to save the program that had won the Euros in 2021 but failed to qualify for the World Cup in 2022? Under Spalletti, Italy were knocked out of the Euros by Switzerland in the round of 16 -- they conceded five total goals and scored only three. And Spalletti was fired in the middle of Italy's unsuccessful 2026 World Cup qualifying campaign. As he put it during his final news conference: "The coach has to make the difference, the players have to make the difference, and unfortunately I did not make the difference." Now, this isn't to say that it's a bad idea to hire a great coach. Didier Deschamps was very successful with Monaco, Juventus and Marseille before taking over with France, where he won one World Cup, lost another final in a shootout, and lasted nearly 15 years. Louis van Gaal pushed the Netherlands from sixth to second in the Elo ratings during his two years in charge between 2012 and 2014. Marcelo Lippi won the World Cup with Italy in 2006 after winning the Champions League and multiple Serie A titles during his second stint with Juventus. And during his one year with Italy between his jobs with Juventus and Chelsea, Antonio Conte took down Spain and lost to Germany in penalties at Euro 2016. But there also are plenty of other disappointments. After success with Chile and then Sevilla, Jorge Sampaoli's Argentina tenure was a disaster, ending in the round of 16 at the 2018 World Cup. Marcelo Bielsa's Uruguay tenure ended with him telling us, "I'm toxic. To associate yourself with me makes you worse off." Julian Nagelsmann's Germany stint ended with one knockout win at Euro 2024 and a round-of-32 defeat to Paraguay at the World Cup. Fabio Capello's England barely made any progress after he left LaLiga-winning Real Madrid to take over the Three Lions. And even Tuchel, Ancelotti and Pochettino failed to exceed their predecessors this past summer. It's not that great club managers can't succeed at the international level -- rather, it's that they've been way less successful than you might think. There are plenty of reasons why. With so few games that actually matter, international soccer increases the randomness in an already random sport. Plus, federations tend to hire big-name coaches when they're desperate, but they're usually desperate because of some kind of structural issue with the talent pool that no big-name coach is able to fix. But the biggest reason why "great coach" doesn't equal "great success" is the one Sarri was complaining about eight years ago: These great coaches barely have any time to coach. Pochettino has coached 33 games with the U.S. in two years; in his last full season with Tottenham, they played 56 games ... in 10 months. Most of what a national team manager does -- scouting the player pool, managing relationships with his players and their clubs, projecting out performance on a multiyear performance timeline for his roster -- has little in common with the next-game-up, tactical obsession that drives the club game. The skill set that gets you the best jobs in Europe isn't necessarily the one that's going to improve the performance of a national team. The last two World Cup-winning managers, after all, have managed a combined zero matches in the Champions League. Maybe that's not a coincidence.