What’s the best age to be an England manager?

'Older man' Harry Redknapp

Harry Redknapp said last week that the England manager role is “an older man’s job”.

At the age of 65, his comment might fairly be construed as an act of self promotion. Although at 64-years-old, fellow contender Roy Hodgson would also fit the bill of an ‘older man’.

Whether Redknapp is trying to shoehorn himself into the England hot-seat is by-the-by; the Tottenham manager is the favourite for the role anyway. Beyond that, there is seemingly a logic to Redknapp’s assessment. With age comes experience, wisdom and instant respect; qualities it could be argued are needed if one is to manage at the highest level.

But is it as simple as that? Does age have a bearing on one’s ability to successfully lead a national team? Is the England role “an older man’s job” as Redknapp believes?

We’ve studied all the England managers going back to Walter Winterbottom’s reign, which began in 1946.

Immediately we see that at the age of 65, Redknapp would become the oldest man to ever take on the job. The previous oldest person was Fabio Capello, who was 62 when the FA put him in charge of the Three Lions. The average age of England managers (excluding caretakers) when taking on the the role is 47.

If we look at England’s most successful managers, judged on tournament success and their age at the time of that success, we would see Sir Alf Ramsey was 46 when England won the World Cup, Bobby Robson was 57 when England reached the semi-finals at Italia 1990 and that Terry Venables was 53 when England reached the semi-finals of Euro 96 on home soil.

We hit a snag when analysing at what age England managers have enjoyed success with the national team. To be blunt – England haven’t been very successful, so there’s little data to work with. But what we can see is that when Ramsey won the World Cup, he was just two years older than Steve McLaren, a manager whose reign collapsed in disarray with some citing his age and inexperience as factors for the unhappy end to his spell in charge.

If we look at win percentages when in charge, the most successful England manager is Capello with a 66.7 per cent win ratio – who as already stated, was 62 when taking the role. The next most successful was Sir Alf with a record of 61.1 per cent. He was 43 when he took charge. The next best is Glenn Hoddle, with a win percentage of 60.7 per cent. Hoddle, at the age of 39, was the youngest England manager since Winterbottom.

What we can glean from this is that with such variations in the age of successful England managers, it would seem that how old a coach is, has little to no correlation on their ability to be a success. If there is any correlation, if anything, the success of Sir Alf and Hoddle suggests that youth is actually a positive thing.

If we spread our net a little further and look at all international managers – what do we see?

Defining what constitutes a successful manager is not an objective task. The quality of players one has to work with, the state the team is in when one takes over, who your opponents are… there are a myriad of influences that will impact on a manager’s ability to get the best out of his team. But for the sake of this, we’ve looked at managers who reached the semi-finals of either a World Cup or European Championships (something England would be more than happy with this summer) going back to the 1980 European Championships held in Italy.

We find that the oldest manager to win a tournament was Luis Aragonés, who at 69 won Euro 2008 with Spain. Franz Beckenbauer was the youngest, he was 44 when he lifted the 1990 World Cup with Germany. The average age of managers who reached the last four of a major tournament over the last 30 years is 52, and the average age of tournament winning coaches is 54 – both ages 10 years younger than Redknapp, and in their early 50s, perhaps not in the bracket of “an older man”.

So, is the England manager role “an older man’s job” as the current favourite to take the reigns of the Three Lions confidently stated this week? Our analysis shows that giving relatively youthful managers a chance to manage England has sometimes proved successful. Yet older managers have also done well. Meanwhile, the optimum age for tournament success is someone in there early 50s. But as we see in the case of Aragonés, there is nothing to stop a manager of an older age succeeding.

The analysis is somewhat inconclusive, so while it can’t tell us what the best age to be an England manager is, it does tell us that employing an “older man” provides no guarantees.

England managers by age…

Name                Term            Took Job        Left Job

Walter Winterbottom    1946-1963        33            50
Alf Ramsey            1963-1974        43            54
Joe Mercer (caretaker)        1974            60            60
Don Revie            1974-1977        47            50
Ron Greenwood        1977-1982        56            60
Bobby Robson        1982-1990        49            57
Graham Taylor        1990-1993        46            49
Terry Venables        1994-1996        51            53
Glenn Hoddle        1996-1999        39            41
Howard Wilkinson (caretaker)    1999, 2000        56            56
Kevin Keegan        1999-2000        48            49
Peter Taylor (caretaker)        2000            47            47
Sven-Goran Eriksson    2001-2006        53            58
Steve McClaren        2006-2007        44            45
Fabio Capello        2008-2011        62            65
Stuart Pearce (caretaker)    2012            49

Age of managers who reached the semi-final stage of major tournaments…

2010 World Cup
Spain 59 (winners first), Netherlands 58, Germany 50, Uruguay 63

2008 Euros
Spain 69, Germany 48, Russia 61, Turkey 54

2006 World Cup
Italy 58, France 54, Germany 41, Portugal 57

2004 Euros
Greece 65, Portugal 55, Netherlands 56, Czech Republic 64

2002 World Cup
Brazil 53, Germany 41, Turkey 49, South Korea 55

2000 Euros
France 58, Italy 58, Portugal 50, Netherlands 37

1998 World Cup
France 56, Brazil 66, Croatia 63, Netherlands 51

1996 Euros
Germany 49, Czech Republic 53, England 53, France 54

1994 World Cup
Brazil 51, Italy 48, Sweden 48, Bulgaria 48

1992 Euros
Denmark 54, Germany 45, Sweden 46, Netherlands 57

1990 World Cup
West Germany 44, Argentina 50, Italy 57, England 57

1988 Euros
Netherlands 53, Soviet Union ??, West Germany 42, Italy 55

1986 World Cup
Argentina 46, West Germany 40, France 48, Belgium 62

1984 Euros
France 51, Spain 40, Portugal 62, Denmark 43

1982 World Cup
Italy 53, West Germany 50, Poland 40, France 49

1980 Euros
West Germany 48, Belgium 56, Italy 51, Czechoslovakia ??

Recent Posts on Sport

• iBet: A tight game between Northampton and Bradford
• On The Road at the Giro d'Italia: Feeling ill and racing in the rain must be pretty grim
• PSG and the French league must be more proactive in dealing with hooliganism
• The ghost at the feast: Luiz Felipe Scolari hopes that dropping Ronaldinho for the Confederations Cup won't come back to haunt Brazil
• iBet: Chelsea and Benfica to continue scoring runs

• steveg0822

  I would like to see Brendan Rogers as England manager. Okay, he is Irish but who cares? I am sure we would all like to see England play the way Swansea do.

• timberanddamp

  From the results since 1966, about two?

• geo32

  Whatever and whoever the next England manager maybe he will FEEL ten years older after the first game. 

  Twenty years older if England were to lose!!

• UpLabour

  judging by the antics and behaviour of those on and off the field, my suggestion for the best age for a manager is between 2 and three.

• timberanddamp

  The illusion of English football must surely now be gone, unless with the die hard fans, or a large proportion of the misfits, that blindly follow their clubs, and continue to pay extortionate prices at the gate for 90 minutes of second rate entertainment in a tribal form, and to consistently keep on attending the matches, the purpose and history has been eroded and hijacked, by greed and self serving at all levels, there are hardly any English players or for that matter managers left, they are all over paid and over here, the whole structure is top heavy and corrupt, with greed not skill being the criteria, with the majority of clubs now being hopelesly in debt, it is only a matter of time before the whole structure falls, it should now be torn down from the top too the bottom, and rebuilt again, FIFA and the FA, have allowed this corruption to grow and are an integral part of the disaster that has been allowed to run unchecked for some 50 years, the whistle should now be blown by the fans on this unmitigated sporting tradgedy.

• http://www.facebook.com/people/David-Gardiner/1020626211 David Gardiner

  Surely you need to be over 40 or perhaps 45 to have the necessary successful experience at the top level? But if you haven’t got that behind you by that age, there’s no point in waiting until you are 65. Someone around 45 who has won titles in good leagues, or who has managed international teams, or both, would be my choice. And never a self promoting nearly man mysteriously beloved by the national media.

• Razas

  Agreed – very eloquently put

• hospitallers

  Terrible article. Poorly written and littered with mistakes. It takes the so-called journalist whole paragraphs of badly argued drivel to make incredibly basic points. Delving deeper and deeper into mundane facts and statistics stolen from Wikipedia makes this article less informed, not more. It’s full of factual errors. And cutting and pasting poorly formatted, mistake-laden tables from other websites reveals him to be a “writer” of the laziest kind; one happy to just “cut and paste”; one unwilling to make a few phone calls or do any research of his own. The fact he is responding to something Harry Redknapp said over a week ago goes to prove he has chosen his subject because he couldn’t think of anything else to write about. Absolute garbage. Please have this writer removed. I shall be contacting senior staff at The Independent to find out why they allow such ill-informed, misleading journalism to be published under The Independent name. 

• http://www.independent.co.uk Independent Moderator

  test