RIP Terry Venables

The big news out of the world of English football this weekend was the death of Terry Venables, the former England, Barcelona and Tottenham Hotspur manager. While those are the ones that I've heard bandied about most in the couple of days since his passing was announced, they're possibly the most high-profile among a long series of jobs starting back in 1976.

Venables wasn't the most successful English manager around, nor the one about whom I had the most knowledge. But he was the manager of the English national team during Euro 96, which was one of the formative experiences of my football fandom, and was the last manager to lead England to a tournament semifinal until Gareth Southgate in 2018.

I think like every fan who was there to watch that tournament, I've built up a mythology about the team he brought to Euro 96. Despite the so-called Golden Generation of later tournaments, that squad was full of big names, not just 80s and 90s icons like Tony Adams, Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne, but also upcoming stars like Gary Neville and Sol Campbell. Up front he had Alan Shearer and Teddy Sheringham, who are also names to conjure with.

What I remember about them is their athleticism and doggedness, two qualities that I don't think were present in later England squads (though the 1998 World Cup quarterfinal against Argentina also stands out as an epic England performance). They were a good canvas on which to project the nation's hopes and fears, to say nothing of the tournament song, Three Lions.

I know less about his time at Barcelona, but ironically that's where he had his greatest success, helping them win their first title since 1974 and reach the final of the European Cup for the first time since 1961. He also brought in English striker Gary Lineker, who had three great seasons for the club, before joining Venables at Spurs.

There are two interesting aspects to Venables's time in Spain: the first is that he got the job based on his performance managing Crystal Palace and Queens Park Rangers - two teams that weren't even in the top-flight when he took them over. You can't really imagine Barcelona hiring an English manager on that kind of record these days.

The other interesting aspect is just the fact that Venables was English. These days you don't see a lot of English managers abroad, and certainly not in the highest-profile teams... or in the highest-profile teams in England, for that matter (other than Frank Lampard walking with misplaced confidence into the Chelsea job). The 80s were a difficult time for English football, because of crowd violence that culminated in the 1985 Heysel disaster and led to English teams being banned from European competition until the 90s.

Venables represented another aspect to the English game, and a path not taken - he and Bobby Robson and Roy Hodgson are the biggest names to have managed abroad, but it seems a shame that more English managers didn't get the chance to pick up the tricks of the trade from the other big leagues. That ban likely made it more difficult for promising English managers to get hired for the big jobs, which has to have set them back years.

England isn't the only team whose players don't travel well - Italian players are famous for not doing well abroad, and the ones who do rarely get picked for the Italian national team. But this lack of managerial experience abroad has been particularly bad for the English, since no Englishman has won the top-flight of English football since 1992, the year before the Premier League began. While most of those titles were won by a Scot, Sir Alex Ferguson, no British manager has won the top-flight since he retired in 2013.

So Venables stands as one of the most successful English managers in history, and one of the few to have won a title abroad. He never had as high-profile a gig in the UK after Euro 96, but he always remained an eminence grise in the game, even recording the odd England theme single from time to time. It's a shame that more English managers didn't follow in his footsteps, but it's telling that one of the players he consoled after the loss in 1996 is Gareth Southgate, who replaced him as the most successful England manager since 1966.