Andrew Trench notes from the revolution

Teams with ‘foreign’ coaches never win World Cups – it’s a fact

The other day we were sitting watching a world cup game and wondering if the nationality of a team's coach had any impact on the team's performance.
 It's hard to say that without appearing xenophobic but we had just witnessed a flurry of exists by teams who had non-nationals as the coach. South Africa had gone out with World Cup-winning coach Brazilian Carlos Parreira at the helm and England with Italian Fabio Capello as coach have also bitten the dust.

Our of curiosity, I went and did a little checking on the statistics and, what would you know, it turns out that no team has ever won the world cup with a foreign coach. This is an amazing fact and is consistent through every world cup final.

See this table for the full list of world cup coaches and their nationality and the winning teams.

On this statistic we can immediately discount three teams who are still in the running from winning this world cup.
They are:

• Chile - whose coach is Argentine Marcelo Bielsa;
• Ghana - whose coach is Serbian Milovan Rajevac, and;
• Paraguay - whose coach is Argentine Gerardo Martino

I'm sure statisticians can say if this trend carries weight or whether it is simply a co-incidence. Is the date set big enough to draw a conclusion? We'll see if this holds true for the rest of the 2010 tournament. I hope not as I am holding thumbs for Ghana like everyone else in South Africa.

I haven't had time to go and see how many times a team with a foreign coach has actually made it to the finals. It would be interesting to check that out

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