Stuart Pearce has this week confirmed what many of us have believed all along: being a national team manager is a part-time job.

Admittedly he is only taking on the England’s Under-21s, not the senior team, temporarily, in addition to his full-time role at Manchester City, but if any further proof was needed that the English FA, along with many of their counterparts in other countries, are wasting their money, and therefore the game’s money, on employing full-time coaches for national teams that play little more than half-a-dozen games in a non-tournament year then this move surely provided it.

Certainly the experiences of Northern Ireland boss Lawrie Sanchez bear this theory out, with his day-to-day job very rarely involving actually working with players, but instead fulfilling promotional and media work - albeit probably not with the written press in Northern Ireland given their frosty relationship with him – as well as the obligatory watching of his squad members playing for their respective clubs.

It doesn’t even involve scouting, since with the many junior level teams that national associations have, there is a natural progression process for the next generation of players to make the step up without the need for Sanchez, or any other national team manager, to turn out to watch localised youth football.

Yet for some unknown reason the English FA, whilst accepting that they must share their Under-21 manager with his club following Peter Taylor’s departure, will be making the job available to applicants on a full-time basis when Pearce steps aside after this summer’s European Under-21s Championship finals to concentrate on Manchester City.

No chance either, then, that they will feel inclined towards a part-time policy when it comes to the senior team, preferring instead to pay Steve McClaren, and before him Sven-Goran Eriksson, handsome salaries to do, well what exactly?

England are hardly pulling up trees in their Euro 2008 qualification campaign, and without wishing to pre-judge their upcoming friendly against Spain, aren’t setting the world alight post Germany 2006 and the distinctly underwhelming performances that categorised another Three Lions failure.

McClaren is already getting comfy in a role that many believe he isn’t well suited to, and when his predecessor settled into this part-time lifestyle of being given the best seats at Premiership matches and being paraded for the cameras at FA events, England on the pitch became as bland as Eriksson was off it.

Is it really such a leap from dividing your time between managing Middlesbrough and assisting Sven-Goran Eriksson, to remaining at Middlesbrough but doing Eriksson’s job, much of the coaching side of which McClaren had been doing for the entirety of his time as number two?

Certainly Peter Taylor found he couldn’t devote his time to both the Under-21s and Crystal Palace, so perhaps it is too much to ask, and the reality is that managers like Stuart Pearce are few and far between. Pearce is young, ambitious, energetic and has managed to sell the idea to his current employers by subtly pointing out the advantages to working with the best young talent in the country and, moreover, having the opportunity to see at close quarters the most talented footballers that are emerging for other nations.

You can see why City would see his involvement with England as advantageous, even though they had concerns about him being distracted from their Premiership commitments – and thus asked for Pearce to be excused from taking charge of an Under-21 friendly in March - whereas should McClaren have tried to combine managing England’s senior team with his duties at Middlesbrough, the chances of Boro seeing any benefit from their manager working with players that they could never hope to buy and observing others that are equally out of their grasp would have been negligible.

It could even be argued that there is a potential conflict of interest between looking after the interests of England’s senior or Under-21 team, whilst at the same time working with players who your club team will face in opposition to them perhaps just days later. It is something that could, even in his short tenure, pose problems for Pearce in his Under-21 capacity and might, therefore, have even greater ramifications if the situation ever existed whereby the senior team manager had a job-share arrangement.

Nevertheless, let’s just call the England job, at senior or Under-21 level, what it is: part-time. Pay the salary commensurate with the amount of free-time that currently comes packaged as the sort of paid leave that if we all had it the economy would grind to a halt, and inject a little realism into a situation that sees one figurehead person being paid to do very little while the grassroots of the game – battling against the lack of playing fields, rigid coaching structures and the lure of the computer game - aren’t even sure they’ll be able to produce the players that in ten to fifteen years time will mean we still have an England team worth managing.

A sober thought for Mr McClaren to ponder as he prepares to actually earn some of his money and put the England players through their paces.