The Room Without a Passport

Michael Owen scored twice against Argentina in Geneva in 2005. It was a fine evening’s work. Twenty-one years later, from the safety of his sofa, he watched Thomas Tuchel’s England squander a lead against the same opponents and reached for the broadest possible conclusion. “There should be no such thing as foreign coaches in international football,” he posted on X.

What happened in Atlanta on Wednesday deserved a more careful autopsy. Anthony Gordon put England ahead in the 55th minute. Tuchel responded by withdrawing Gordon and Declan Rice for defenders, retreating into a low block against the greatest player of all time with 35 minutes still to play. Messi found space, Enzo Fernandez equalised in the 86th minute, and Lautaro Martinez struck in stoppage time. England were out 2-1. That was a tactical failure. It was not a passport failure.

Israel knows something about this question. For a small footballing nation competing in UEFA, a confederation it joined only in 1991 after years of geopolitical exclusion from Asia, the decision of whom to place in the dugout has never been a matter of sentiment. It has been a matter of survival.

In 2000, the Israel Football Association appointed Richard Møller Nielsen, the Dane who had engineered one of football’s great miracles by leading Denmark to the 1992 European Championship. A coach recalled from the beach, given ten days to prepare a squad of holiday-makers, and handed the Henri Delaunay trophy in Gothenburg. Israel looked at that record and saw not a foreigner but a winner. Møller Nielsen brought the same quiet professionalism to Ramat Gan, and nobody in Tel Aviv questioned his passport.

Eighteen years later, the IFA went further. In 2018, technical director Willibald Ruttensteiner, an Austrian, recommended his compatriot Andreas Herzog for the top job. The appointment raised eyebrows. Herzog was best remembered in Israel for the injury time free kick he had scored against them in 2001, a goal that knocked the blue and white out of World Cup qualifying. Yet the IFA’s search committee, chaired by former star Eli Ohana, looked past the symbolism. “There are excellent Israeli coaches,” Ohana said, “but this committee evaluated all the options.” He then drew the comparison that now looks prophetic: “Gareth Southgate did not have much experience either and look what he has accomplished.” When Herzog resigned in 2020, Ruttensteiner himself stepped into the role and continued the project.

Apply Owen’s principle to Israel and you erase this entire arc. A country of ten million, competing against the depth of Germany, France, and Spain, told to shut its dugout door and make do. That is not patriotism. It is protectionism pinned to a badge.

The irony cuts both ways. If foreign coaches should be banned, then presumably Israeli coaches should be banned from managing abroad. That principle would have prevented Avram Grant from ever sitting in the Chelsea dugout. In 2007, Grant, born in Petah Tikva, replaced José Mourinho at Stamford Bridge and did what the Portuguese never managed: he took Chelsea to the Champions League final. Grant later managed Portsmouth and West Ham in the Premier League, then crossed continents to coach Ghana, where his Israeli passport caused genuine diplomatic complications in North African away fixtures. The football world did not collapse. It adapted.

Talent has never respected borders, and football already knows this. Oscar Gloukh plays his club football at Ajax. Daniel Peretz keeps goal for Southampton. Israeli players move freely across Europe because ability, not nationality, determines selection. Owen would apply that logic to the pitch but not to the dugout, which is rather like insisting a hospital may recruit surgeons from anywhere in the world but must hire only local administrators to run it.

Owen cites a statistic in his defence: no country has ever won the World Cup with a foreign coach. It is a small sample dressed as a law of nature. Brazil, Germany, Argentina, and Spain have historically produced enough elite coaches that they have rarely needed to look elsewhere. England, by contrast, has spent most of the 21st century under foreigners precisely because its own managerial pipeline has not kept pace with its playing talent. Eriksson reached three successive quarter finals. Capello reached a round of sixteen. Tuchel reached a semi final, further than either of his foreign predecessors. The results have varied, but the passport has never been the deciding factor.

Sunday’s final will feature Spain’s Luis de la Fuente and Argentina’s Lionel Scaloni, two domestic coaches at the helm of two nations rich enough in footballing culture to look inward. Good for them. But legislating that model for everyone is like demanding every country produce its own jet engines because the Americans and the French manage to.

Owen wants to build a wall around the international dugout. Israel tried the opposite. It opened the door to a Dane who had won a European Championship, two Austrians who modernised its football infrastructure, and then, when the time was right, handed the job back to an Israeli in Ran Ben Shimon. The door swung both ways: Grant walked through it in the other direction and reached the biggest match in club football.

Owen would rather that room stood empty, furnished with nothing but a flag and a bolt on the door. In football, as in geopolitics, that is how you guarantee the room stays cold and the trophies stay elsewhere.