The rise and rise of the Premier League’s frontier coaches

When Oliver Glasner was growing up in the small Austrian town of Riedau, the Bavarian border was just 32km (20 miles) to the north. It meant three of the five of the channels available to him on television were German ones.

“I could see a little more than the regular Austrian,” the Crystal Palace manager, 50, told The Athletic ahead of his team’s draw with Leicester City last weekend. 

Glasner admitted he did not realise it at the time, but his geographical place in the world opened his eyes and by extension his mind to wider possibilities. He was also exposed to broader European football in a way many other Austrians were not — the country’s domestic teams were not as successful as those from neighbouring Germany, and therefore there were fewer matches on TV to watch. It surely increased his understanding of the game he came to love. “I was always crazy about football…” he concluded.

Glasner is not an outlier in this season’s Premier League: nine of the division’s 20 managers were either born or raised within 50 kilometres of a national border, with Erik ten Hag, Arne Slot, Unai Emery, Mikel Arteta, Andoni Iraola, Thomas Frank, Kieran McKenna and Julen Lopetegui completing the list.

Another, Pep Guardiola, is from Catalonia, a region which has long sought autonomy from Spain, while one more — Nuno Espirito Santo — hails from Sao Tome and Principe, an island nation off Africa’s Atlantic coast which has been independent for less than 50 years.

It all suggests that this is the season of the frontier manager, four of whom meet in games this weekend.

At Selhurst Park, Glasner leads Palace against a Manchester United team under Ten Hag, who was born in the Dutch town of Haaksbergen, just 10km from Germany; at Anfield, Liverpool’s Slot (brought up in Bergentheim, a town in the Netherlands separated from German soil by 12km), faces Bournemouth and Iraola, who comes from Usurbil, in Spain but 34km from France.

But is this just a geographical quirk, or a trend which reveals something about the characters of those in charge of many of England’s elite clubs?

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Of the four managers in this season’s Premier League to hail from the Basque Country, in northern Spain, close to the French border, Unai Emery is perhaps the quintessential frontier coach.

He grew up in the border town of Hondarribia, separated from France by the Bidasoa river, and his career is a good one to reflect upon because of all the managers with connections to borders, he has managed the most clubs in the highest number of countries, having held nine positions in Spain, Russia, France and England. By modern standards, certainly at the elite levels, this qualifies him as an itinerant coach. 

“I left home at 24 – Hondarribia, San Sebastian, Real Sociedad – and opened myself up to the world of football: carrying my suitcase, facing many difficult moments, leaving my comfort zone,” Emery told UK newspaper The Guardian in 2022, shortly before he was on the move again, leaving Villarreal in his homeland for Aston Villa. 

Emery played just five games for Real Sociedad, his boyhood club, and would spend the majority of his playing career in Spain’s second tier. Perhaps his path was one of necessity: he had to make a living, and he wanted it to be in football. Yet maybe the travel involved in this process was made slightly easier by the fact that as a child, somewhere else was never that far away.

Though he would see planes swoop over the estuary of the Bidasoa just west of San Sebastian, landing at Donostia airport (another reminder there was a world waiting to be explored), the details of the geography surely matter: Hondarribia blurs into another Basque town called Irun just to the south, which then merges into Hendaye — also Basque, but in France. The area was one of the busiest crossing points between the two countries, and travellers were sometimes able to make the journey by train without showing their passports.

It is tempting to think this made Emery more intellectually curious, and made it more straightforward for him to work with people from other cultures, yet psychologists suggest this kind of upbringing had the potential to send him the other way, which may explain other facets of his management.

“Proximity to multiple cultures, including languages and various traditions, can help with adapting to new environments, resolving conflict, and being sensitive to differences,” says sports psychologist Marc Sagal, who has worked with several Premier League clubs. “Perhaps from a less obvious perspective, this could contribute to a bit of entrenchment and solidification of a person’s identity. In other words, there might be times when, because of so many other influences, there is a desire to protect and preserve one’s way of doing things.

“Border regions often have unique identities that are very separate from the countries they belong to, which can lead individuals to cling tightly to their local culture. The desire to preserve one’s unique cultural heritage might manifest in football managers as an exceptionally tight attachment to a playing style, football philosophy, or identity.

“The Basque identity is powerful and culturally distinct from Spain and France. It’s easy to see how this could result in a more insular approach, a desire to promote local talent, or adhere firmly to a specific tactical philosophy. From the outside, it seems like Emery is a bit more rigid about applying his philosophy and Basque-influenced methodology than (San Sebastian-born Arsenal manager) Arteta, for example, who seems quite keen on creating an environment best suited for the players. Both approaches can be very effective, and both are likely impacted in part by geography and experience.” 

Emery’s relationship with France would surely have been different to Ten Hag’s and Slot’s relationship with Germany. While to Emery, Spain and France met in an urban sprawl, with a border that was distinct, for the two Dutchmen their experience of frontier territory was rural.   

Drive in the area around Haaksbergen and Bergentheim, and you may not even realise you have crossed from the Netherlands to Germany and back again. Yet, as The Athletic discovered when visiting both towns in May, residents in these bible-belt towns felt very Dutch indeed and would only hop over the border to buy cheaper fuel for their cars.

Slot, however, is far from closed-minded. Dan Abrahams, a sports psychologist who worked with him for two seasons when he was manager of Rotterdam club Feyenoord before this summer’s move to Liverpool, describes his former colleague to The Athletic as “very open-minded” and a coach who is willing to “challenge perceived notions about Dutch football”.

Bergentheim is conservative, religious and sober, yet Slot developed more of a burgundy lifestyle as he pursued a playing career which drew him closer to the other end of the country, and its border with Belgium, during a five-year spell with NAC Breda.  

Abrahams references the “biopsychosocial model” first conceptualised by American psychiatrist George Engel in 1977, which suggested that to understand any person’s medical condition, biological factors should not be the only consideration, but also the psychological and social ones. “What people experience is the product of complex interaction,” Abrahams says. “Our social environment is a significant mediator in who we become.”

He identifies Slot as a “critical thinker”. The coach gave Abrahams permission to be straight with him, yet he would check and challenge what he had to say, stretching his boundaries. Quite how much of this was down to his experiences in Bergentheim was difficult to gauge (his conversations with Slot did not extend to his background) but ultimately, Abrahams believes living close to another country with an identity as strong as his own must have had an effect. “Such proximity has the potential to make a person more inward looking, or outward,” Abrahams concludes.

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It seems obvious that any place’s location might influence its industry and subsequently the employment opportunities that exist there.

Big business gravitates towards big cities, but very few of the current crop of Premier League managers had metropolitan upbringings. Only four were raised in major conurbations — Fuham’s Marco Silva (Lisbon), Wolves’ Gary O’Neil (London), Ange Postecoglou of Tottenham (Melbourne, after being born in Athens) and Brighton’s Fabian Hurzeler (Munich, via Houston in the United States).

Big cities, though they do sometimes exist on borders, tend not to be built near other countries for the simple reason that rulers feared losing them to invasion. Beyond the no-man’s land on either side of any frontier, smaller settlements, therefore, have a habit of stimulating manual work, and as such, a requirement among the residents for grafting.

Neither Slot nor Ten Hag had manual labour in their blood. While Slot’s parents were teachers and considered lower middle class, the Ten Hags had a property empire, and were certainly not short of cash. Yet a strong work ethic was still fundamental to their ethos, and has informed each manager’s way of working. 

Though the geography around Guardiola was different, he shares attributes with obsessive figures such as Ten Hag and Slot if you listen to those who know him most.

Catalonia and the Basque Country are not poor regions, but claims for independence are related to their economies and how people believe they should benefit from local resources.

Guardiola grew up in Santpedor, 70km north of Barcelona. According to the writer and film director Dave Trueba, when he spoke to the BBC in 2018, what defines the Manchester City manager is his willingness to get his hands dirty rather than any alternative way of thinking, which sometimes manifests in his football teams.

“When it comes to analysing or judging Guardiola, you must bear in mind that underneath the elegant suit, the cashmere jumper and the tie, is the son of a bricklayer,” Trueba said. “Inside those expensive Italian shoes, there is a heart in espadrilles.”

Those feet have covered some ground, too, with Guardiola having managed in Catalonia, Germany and now England’s north-west en route to becoming the most celebrated coach of his generation. 

He, like many of his peers, has learned to appreciate the value of looking past his horizon to the wider world beyond. 

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: John Bradford)