At least Thomas Tuchel is likely to be spared the kind of reception that awaited Sven-Goran Eriksson when the Swede became the first foreign coach to manage the England national team.

“FA, hang your heads in shame. No surrender,” read the banner held by a man standing outside FA headquarters in London in November 2000. The protestor was dressed as “John Bull”, a pulp magazine personification of Englishness, wearing a top hat, a red jacket, a Union Jack waistcoat and a look of profound distaste.

It went beyond that one-man protest. Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, called Eriksson’s appointment “a betrayal of our coaching structure”. John Barnwell, his counterpart at the League Managers Association, said it “beggars belief — another example of us giving away our family treasures in Europe”.

The most famous – or infamous – line surrounding Eriksson’s arrival came from the Daily Mail’s veteran columnist Jeff Powell, who wrote that the FA was “selling our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer-throwers who spend half their lives living in total darkness”.

In the documentary released shortly before he died in August, Eriksson looked back and laughed. “England: you can’t say no,” he said with a chuckle. “I would have regretted (not taking it) all my life, I suppose.”

Despite the anguish brought by three successive quarter-final defeats (and despite his dismay over tabloid scrutiny of his private life), Eriksson never regretted answering the FA’s call. Fabio Capello, who seven years later became England’s second overseas coach, has been known to give the opposite impression.

The strange thing about Tuchel’s impending appointment is that it feels so… 2000s, frankly. Wasn’t the FA meant to have consigned its overseas coach era to history by now?

Yes, it was. That was made clear when St George’s Park was opened amid considerable fanfare 12 years ago. David Sheepshanks, the chairman of the project, told reporters that the FA would not have to look abroad for England coaches of the future if, as he expected, “we have homegrown Premier League and international managers emanating from the education advantages” the new national football centre would offer. Rather than throw millions of pounds at short-term solutions, this was a long-term investment.

This surge of homegrown coaching talent has not happened – at least not to anything like the degree hoped for and anticipated.

Some bleak statistics: no English manager has won a European trophy since Bobby Robson with Barcelona in 1997; no English manager has won the league title since Howard Wilkinson with Leeds United in 1992; no English manager has even won the FA Cup since Harry Redknapp with Portsmouth in 2008 or the League Cup since Steve McClaren with Middlesbrough in 2004; since 2003, English managers have taken charge of a combined total of just 44 matches in the Champions League (Frank Lampard 16, Redknapp 10, Graham Potter seven, Eddie Howe six, Craig Shakespeare three, Michael Carrick one, Gary Neville one).

International football is different, though. It is why someone as successful as Capello (a “winner with a capital W”, as then-FA chief executive Brian Barwick lauded him on his appointment) found himself so flummoxed by the peculiar demands of managing England at a World Cup. It is why someone with a CV as underwhelming as Gareth Southgate’s (45 wins from 151 games in charge of Middlesbrough) could be responsible for their two best tournament campaigns since that solitary World Cup triumph in 1966.

Nor is this phenomenon unique to the England team. Look at the contrast between Spain’s underwhelming performance at the 2022 World Cup, under a Champions League-winning coach in Luis Enrique, and their vibrant displays in winning Euro 2024 under a coach, Luis de la Fuente, who, like Southgate, has acquired experience through the national team’s junior setup.

Look at Argentina’s success under Lionel Scaloni, whose only previous experience as a head coach was with their under-20 team. But the longer Southgate stayed in the job, the closer he came without quite delivering the success the country craves, the more you could hear the clamour for the FA to appoint another “winner with a capital W”.

Gareth Southgate was always cast in some quarters as the reason England kept falling just short, which, after decades of falling a long way short, seemed strange. Whatever the undoubted qualities he brought to the job, it was always assumed by his critics that any half-decent coach who operates in the top half of the Premier League or the later stages of the Champions League would bring all of those plus, crucially, the hard-nosed winning mentality and hard-wired tactical expertise of a Pep Guardiola, a Carlo Ancelotti or a Jurgen Klopp.

Or… a Thomas Tuchel? Possibly, but this appointment still represents an unexpected pivot from an FA that has spent the past decade banging the drum – with growing confidence, it had seemed – for English coaches.

They never closed the door entirely on the idea of looking overseas for an England manager – indeed, they have reaped huge dividends from going Dutch with the appointment of Sarina Wiegman, who in 2022 led England to their first Women’s European Championship title. The fact that Tuchel has worked in English football previously – and shown an affinity with English players, both at Chelsea and at Bayern – is an advantage that Eriksson and Capello did not have.

But it has consistently been made clear by the FA, even as different executives and decision-makers have come and gone, that a homegrown candidate would be its preference. There was some support for the idea of a permanent elevation for England Under-21 coach Lee Carsley, who took charge of the senior team on an interim basis after Southgate resigned in July. There has certainly been enthusiasm, going back several years, for the notion of appointing Howe or Potter.

But when it came to the crunch, after tentative enquiries about Guardiola (focused on Manchester City) and Klopp (preparing for a new role as Red Bull’s head of global soccer) came to nothing, they moved decisively for Tuchel, swayed by his trophy successes as coach of Borussia Dortmund (one DFB-Pokal/German Cup), Paris Saint-Germain (two Ligue 1 titles, a Coupe de France/French Cup, a Coupe de la Ligue/French League Cup and two Trophees des Champions/French Super Cups), Chelsea (one Champions League, one European Super Cup, one Club World Cup) and Bayern Munich (one Bundesliga title).

It is a level of trophy success that no English coach comes within a million miles of. Howe can boast a Championship (English second-tier) title with Bournemouth, Potter a Svenska Cupen/Swedish Cup success with Ostersunds and Carsley a European Under-21 Championship title with England — all of them, Howe’s in particular, impressive in their own right — but none has come close to landing any of the game’s biggest prizes.

• The Athletic report