This week Harry Redknapp has been speaking up on behalf of one of the world's most endangered species, the British manager. The British manager is football's answer to the white rhino. Except of course that nobody believes that eating a British football manager's nose will cure impotence.

"Every club will have a foreign owner eventually and you'll get less British managers,'' Redknapp said on Monday in one of those plaintive calls for biodiversity we usually expect to hear from the Duke of Edinburgh shortly before he blows something away with a 12-bore.

"Mark Hughes was doing a terrific job at Man City. But new owners want to bring in somebody they have heard of. There are some terrific managers in the Championship and below who just need the chance. But a big club will always go for that sexy name," Redknapp claimed.

The latter may seem rather a bizarre pronouncement, but let us not forget that the human libido is a strange and mysterious thing. While it may seem incredible to you and I that anyone should experience even the ghost of arousal when they hear the words "Rafael Benítez" or "Avram Grant", it must be acknowledged that football club owners are a different breed from the rest of us. Who is to say that the very thought of Guus Hiddink or Louis van Gaal doesn't have some of the oligarchs and oil barons reaching for the Kleenex? After all, as Redknapp wisely points out, more and more of them are foreigners and we all know what they are like, the saucy devils.

Redknapp's words have re-ignited the debate about the fate of the British manager and much of what has been written since has conjured up a nightmare vision in which the innocent if bumbling UK gaffer is hunted to extinction by uncaring immigrants in much the same way the white settlers exterminated the American buffalo. Indeed, it is hard not to envisage an horrific scene in which a vast herd of thousands of British bosses gambol merrily about on the open grasslands of Lilleshall or Hackney Marshes, moving cones, organising card schools and making sure nobody eats any spicy continental grub on match days, while unbeknownst to them a gang of ruthless transatlantic hunters approach down wind, picking up the tell-tale British manager scent of shaving soap, dubbin and embrocation.

As he slots a shell into his rifle, the leader of the marksmen, Roman Abramovich in all likelihood, mutters, "Shoot the leader of the herd first otherwise the rest'll be spooked", and a few seconds later Sir Alex Ferguson has crumpled to the turf emitting a last embittered tirade about the amount of injury time that was played on Saturday.

By the end of the day the plain is strewn with the carcasses of British managers, already stripped of their valuable pelts of nylon and polyester warm-up coats, which are then shipped off to mainland Europe to be turned into hats for fashionable Parisian ladies. Later, a man will come in a cart and gather up the bones to turn into fertiliser for the playing surfaces of San Siro and Camp Nou.

To be honest, though, I think British football managers have been their own worst enemies. There was a time when if you cut a British football manager he'd bleed winceyette pyjamas, hot water bottles and custard creams, but in recent years all but a few have abandoned their Britishness to chase what they fondly believe are modern methods. Out have gone good old British staples such as mangling foreign names (Joe Mercer always called Johan Cruyff "Cruffy"), paring brown suede shoes with tracksuit bottoms and becoming so obsessed with signs and portents that they had to wear their suit back to front, step on the cracks on the way to the ground and never use the definite article on match days. Instead they have embraced pro-zone, holistic dentistry and vibrating warm-down chairs.

The result is that these days the British manager, with honourable exceptions such as Redknapp, Sir Alex and Roy Hodgson, who is very much a gentleman PE Teacher from the Alec Stock mould, is no longer recognisable. Even Sam Allardyce, apparently the most sturdily British of all our managers, is more concerned with motivational psychology and Feng Shui than he is with standing in the pouring rain yelling dog's abuse at his players as they each carry a small pit pony up a slagheap for the 15th time.

And this to my mind is the problem. Because if we look at the world at large we can see that the British companies that are most successful are those that place a heavy emphasis on their Britishness: Burberry, Aquascutum, Barbour – foreigners love these brands. Even in France they like traditional British things. There's hardly a posh restaurant in Paris theses days that doesn't have apple crumble on the menu.

In continental Europe they used to love British football managers too. That's why in Spain the coach is always called "Mister". But that was back when British managers were undeniably British. Maybe it's too late to turn back the clock, but if Mark Hughes is serious about his career I'd drop the Armani suits and start wearing a trilby hat and a monkey-shit brown mac over my tracksuit from now on.