Gareth Southgate can consider his dress rehearsal well and truly passed. Four matches, no defeats. Only two goals conceded, both to Spain. An uncomplicated sweeping aside of Malta here, a drubbing handed out in the Auld Enemy clash there. The likeable coach is now the 1/16 favourite to be installed as England’s next permanent manager.

If only every job interview were so straightforward. Barring an understrength, experimental Spain side who staged a two-goal fightback to rob England of victory on 95 minutes, none of England’s opponents so far have exactly screamed top quality. But here is Southgate, about to be handed the England job on the back of four not exactly heart-stopping football matches.  

If that does not sound like enough to justify landing the top job at the team currently ranked 12th in the world, that is because it is not. But there is one thing that qualifies Southgate for the job above all: his passport.  

The England manager’s job is one where that sort of nationalism – the little Englandism that came to a head this June – has run its course with scarcely a meander. To date, only two men who have held the post in its 70-year history have been born outside of these shores: Sven-Göran Eriksson and Fabio Capello.  

Since Capello stood down four and a half years ago in a dispute over John Terry being stripped of the captaincy, the argument that the England manager simply must be an Englishman has found new life.  

When Sam Allardyce was jettisoned from the job almost as quickly as he had been dropped into it, scarcely anyone dared to suggest that England should look abroad for their next coach. On the BBC’s Football Focus, Danny Mills and Alan Shearer attempted to lay down the law: “We’re England,” mused Shearer profoundly, “we have to be managed by an English person.”

The sheer boredom of watching England

The collected thoughts of Shearer and Mills never amounted to anything particularly substantial. But what they did do was capture the national mood. Imagine if – when 52 per cent of the public had voted to leave the EU – the FA had selected a foreigner to lead the England team. With English nationalism on the rise the safest, and the most patriotic, choice is clearly to put an Englishman in charge.

But all this insistence that the England manager must be English is scarcely ever challenged. Certainly nowhere close to the same extent as Amber Rudd’s proposals to ‘name and shame’ businesses employing over a certain threshold of overseas workers. Both policies are similar beasts, but only one was controversial. Watch hardly anyone challenge the FA when Southgate is airdropped into the job with a mere four games at this level, only two of which provided victories, and foreign candidates are discarded from consideration for the mere fact of being foreign.

The vote to leave the EU and the FA insisting on hiring Englishmen both send a similar message: ‘we can manage well enough on our own, thanks.’

But can we really? Too many of football’s tactical breakthroughs are made outside of England’s borders for us to think we can get by without them. Pep Guardiola’s system of jealously guarding possession – inspired of course by the Dutch totalvoetbal style – is starting to take shape at Manchester City. Jürgen Klopp’s breathless, relentless pressure game, honed during his career at Mainz, has invigorated a Liverpool side who just a year ago had gone stale under Ulsterman Brendan Rodgers. And the system that delivered Arsenal an entire league season unbeaten in 2004 was honed in Monaco and Japan before being brought over to London.

The fear of being left behind on a European stage is too great for our clubs to consider retreating into themselves, away from the influence of foreign thinking. Yet the national inquests which ensue exit after ignominious exit from international tournaments rarely convince England that they should go another way.  

Following Fabio Capello’s resignation from the post in 2012, the FA did not give Pep Guardiola the benefit of a phone call when his representatives made clear his interest in the role. So determined were they to ensure that the new coach be an Englishman, the FA appointed Hodgson instead.  

The Catalan has two European Cups to his name, among a host of other titles in Spain and in Germany. He currently sits two points from the top of the Premier League, having also masterminded a superb victory over former employers Barcelona earlier this month. Roy Hodgson took England to three tournaments, won a total of three matches across all of them. A limp defeat to the indefatigable Icelanders cost him his job.  

When the final whistle sounded in Nice on 27th June, it was hard not to wonder if FA top brass did not think back to the summer of 2012 with a twinge of regret. But then what they got in Allardyce was not just a man too dishonest to last more than 67 days in his job, but also a day-by-day potboiler of a coach who worshipped at the altar of wing commander Charles Reep, the founder of the long-ball game that became a pillar of English tactical instruction in the 1950s.  

If England won Euro 2016…

Reep’s idea that the long pass was the most efficient way to score a goal because it reduced the amount of successful turnovers needed to put the ball in the net was considered innovative back then. These days, it has been replaced at the very top of the game by systems which favour keeping the ball, starving the opponent of possession and tiring them out so as to pick them off in the latter stages of a match. Typically, these are systems which take their origins on the Continent, and not in England.  

Take Del Bosque’s tremendous Spain team, who passed and moved their way to the World Cup in 2010. Six of Spain’s starting 11 in the final were graduates of Barcelona’s famous La Masia – an academy where boys as young as six can go to be educated as people as well as footballers. There, youngsters are taught to keep hold of the ball at all costs and move intelligently in order to find space in behind the defensive line, just as you would see Messi and co. on a Saturday afternoon at the Camp Nou. The seeds of that style were honed in the Netherlands in the 1970s, and are reaped daily on the streets of Catalonia.  

With an open mind, the Spanish made totalvoetbal their own, transforming it into something quintessentially, unmistakably Spanish. The fact that it denied the Netherlands the World Cup is not just poetic – it proves just how revolutionary the influence of foreign thinking can be when it is allowed to develop at every level of a country’s footballing culture.

With Allardyce out of a job in disgrace, the FA stood before a unique opportunity to transform the culture of English football for the better. Instead, they will choose the easy way out. To show any ambition, any desire to break the mould would simply be rocking the boat.

So, go on, have another English manager if you must: just don’t be surprised when nothing changes.