AND SO, yet another of England’s much feted but, at international level at least, not notably successful Golden Generation™ has collected his P45 after a short-lived and less than glittering stint as manager.

After just 82 days and two wins in 15 games, Wayne Rooney joins Frank Lampard, Gary and Phil Neville, Sol Campbell and Paul Scholes on the managerial scrap heap at the tender age of 38.

It’s quite possible that Steven Gerrard will join them soon, given his Al-Ettifaq team are currently on a run of nine games without a win.

Yet, it would be harsh to suggest this was unique to this group of players. The rather more successful generation of 1966 World Cup winners (remember them?) produced a similar paucity of managerial talent.

Bobby Charlton, Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Alan Ball all had spells in the dugout with little notable fortune. The only alumnus from that group who could be said to have been a successful manager was Jack Charlton.

It’s almost as if great players don’t make great, or even vaguely competent, managers. And yet, this seems to be a curiously English phenomenon.

There are numerous foreign players who successfully made the move from player to manager such as Dutch master Johan Cruyff and his protege Pep Guardiola, Franz Beckenbauer, Didier Deschamps, Fabio Capelo, Zinedine Zidane and Roberto Mancini, to name but a few.

Arguably the most successful is Carlo Ancelotti, who won two European Cups as a player and was a knee injury away from being part of Italy’s 1982 World Cup winning team.

As a manager, he has won four Champions League titles and is the only person to lead teams to the title in Europe’s top five national leagues.

After he retired as a player, Ancelotti spent three years studying for his coaching qualifications at Coverciano, Italy’s football “university,” where he wrote a thesis titled The Future of Football: More Dynamism.

He also served an apprenticeship as a coach under Arrigo Sacchi before taking his first job as a manager in Serie B.

By contrast, Rooney’s first management job came in 2020 at Derby County, while he was still a player. He only completed his coaching qualifications in June last year.

Given that this was well into his second job as manager, at DC United, it’s hard not to think that this was a case of something he had to do, rather than something that he saw the value of.

Perhaps I’m being unfair, and it’s certainly not my intention to belittle Rooney. Like all of us, he is very much the product of his environment and, in football terms at least, that environment was one that did not place any great value on education.

And herein lies the problem. The Golden Generation™, and those English players that came before them, were not encouraged to think about the game and articulate their ideas in a way that so many of their foreign counterparts were.

A little over a decade ago, in 2012, Rooney sat down for an interview with David Winner, author of Brilliant Orange — which analysed the development of football in the Netherlands from the 1960s onwards.

Winner wanted to talk to the prodigiously talented 26-year-old about how he thought about the game. He felt that behind Rooney’s “prominent brow and famously thick skull resides an underappreciated mind.”

It was a press junket of some sort; Winner was on a conveyor belt of people interviewing Rooney. Alan Shearer, another great English player who has found managing to be a little tricky (P8 W1 D2 L5), was the “journalist” who had the slot before.

When Winner told the erstwhile Newcastle boss of his intended line of questioning, Shearer was dismissive. “I think he probably won’t be able to tell you how he got his talent and his ability. He was born with it.”

Rooney’s agent, Paul Stretford, was similarly disparaging, suggesting Rooney was an “instinctive” player who might be unwilling or unable to discuss his game in conceptual terms.

And yet, as the interview with Winner, albeit briefly, demonstrated, Rooney clearly does think about the game in a way that neither his detractors, who are all too quick to dismiss him as an uneducated oik, nor his supporters, who are all too quick to label him a footballing savant, seem to appreciate.

He discussed the (self-taught but now commonplace) visualisation techniques he employed and how he trained to enhance his spatial awareness to help him solve the complex problems he encountered on the pitch.

His football talent was the result of hours of practice through numerous games and challenges he created for himself as a youngster and which, unwittingly, developed and honed his skills.

However, when Rooney was a youth team player at Everton, the prevailing attitude among the coaching staff was that his talents were innate; he couldn’t be improved by them.

This is not surprising.

In their book Why England Lose, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski discuss how one anonymous football administrator who had spent decades trying to introduce coaching courses into the British game had his efforts repeatedly mocked by clubs.

“People would say, ‘The trouble with football today is that there’s too much coaching’,” he told Kuper and Szymanski. Then added somewhat despairingly: “That’s like saying, ‘The trouble with school is that there’s too much education’.”

This was by no means a unique experience. Kuper and Szymanski found that although things were beginning to shift due to the influx of foreign managers, this anti-intellectualisation was pervasive within the game. “Coaching” and “tactics” were “shame words.”

The book was published in 2009. Rooney was already six years into his England career. This was the coaching environment, if you can call it that, which was prevalent when the Golden Generation™ came of age.

It’s very likely that Winner was one of only a very few people, if not the first, to actively encourage Rooney to think and talk about how and why he did what he did on the pitch.

Given the blood-and-thunder, up-and-at-’em ethos of the English game, it’s unlikely that when Rooney was a player that he was ever really encouraged to analyse tactics or playing styles.

In short, it’s unlikely that he was ever encouraged to engage in the in-depth critical thinking about the game that Ancelotti had to while researching the thesis he wrote during his studies at Coverciano.

It’s little wonder, then, that when Rooney and his peers from the Golden Generation™ graduated to become managers — a role in which the ability to think about the game and develop and articulate a tactical strategy are fundamental requirements — they were simply not up to the job.