On the surface it seems that the FA have got it right at last.
You only have to look at the man’s credentials to realize that he has been successful wherever he has been.
He won league titles at AC Milan, AS Roma, Juventus and at Real Madrid.
In total, he has won 9 league titles in his career, with the winning of the scudetto with Roma being the most impressive of the lot. As with the other teams he was expected to win the title but at Roma he was with an underdog.
But like all things in life, on the surface is never the whole story as when you look deeper then you start to see the many cracks in the overall story.
Fabio Capello has built a reputation of being a hard taskmaster that does not pick players on reputations but on how well suited they are to his cause.
The thing about Capello is that he plays to a very rigid 4-4 -2 formation that would suit England as that’s the only formation they are comfortable with.
He favours a midfield of 2 holding midfielders that should be strong and athletic and 2 tall strikers.
England do not possess a lot of players with these characteristics and it would be interesting to see what he does about it.
How the press would deal with the fact that Capello would favour a frontline partnership of Peter Crouch and Emile Heskey is anyone’s guess.
Players like Michael Owen, Wayne Rooney, and Jermaine Defoe would not get too much of a look in unless he is instructed by someone higher up to play Rooney and Owen constantly.
He is very likely to fall out with one of the big stars in the long run because he always does and he is not going to be particularly popular with a lot of the players but he would get the best out of them because he is a great manager.
He does not have the kind of technical players that he has worked in the past as there is no Marco Van Basten, Roberto Donadoni, Marcel Desailly, Patrick Vieira, Emerson, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Pavel Nedved, Alessandro Del Piero, Francesco Totti, Raul, Ruud Van Nistlerooy, Gianluigi Buffon or Gabriel Batistuta.
But the most significant thing about Capello is that he is more successful in winning league and not cups. His success is also based on his rivals messing up along the way as well as his own abilities. It is very telling that Capello down the years has only managed to win 1 Champions league compared to his league successes.
He is not the most technical of managers as he has been found wanting too many times when things are going wrong in certain matches. He is certainly no match for Jose Mourinho, Marcello Lippi, Gerard Houllier, Gus Hiddink and Phil Scholari to name a few managers with far superior technical nous.
He would definitely get England to be better than they are right now but he would not win the world cup as 1st of the players are not good enough for that and Capello is not a manager that takes enough risks to win cup games.