SOCCER/On the Premiership:Arsène Wenger had it right. Nine years ago, shortly after winning his first league and cup double at Arsenal, the Frenchman was asked whether his managerial ambitions stretched beyond the confines of the club game. Wenger shook his head and smiled wryly before delivering his reply: "You have to be a masochist to want to become an international manager."

The task of leading a country's football team has always blended pain and pleasure, and not necessarily in equal measures. The relatively light work-load, being able to pick from the cream of a nation's talent and the handsome salary are undeniable perks, but they come at a heavy price.

International football is in the throes of a mini-crisis. Its prestige has been dealt a hammer blow by the growth of lucrative European leagues and the TV-friendly Champions League - which dominates the winter and spring schedules - and it is the managers who must count the cost.

In football's new world order, national coaches have been relegated to the status of second-class citizens. They are continually undermined by their club colleagues, who treat international dates as irksome inconveniences and routinely lie about the fitness of their own charges in a bid to keep them at home, and that sneering attitude is filtering down to the players themselves.

A call-up for your country used to be the pinnacle of achievement but many footballers would now rather spare their bodies the stresses and strains of long-haul flights and exhausting summer schedules.

It is three years since Paul Scholes, the man whose inspired performances did so much to win the title for Manchester United last season, kicked a ball in anger on the world stage, while Jamie Carragher has chosen to limit his considerable talents to Liverpool.

And it is not just the elder statesmen who are becoming choosy. Blackburn's David Bentley rejected the chance to join up with the England under-21 squad for this summer's European Championships, citing "exhaustion" while Anthony Stokes missed Ireland's under-21 meeting with Germany last month. The Sunderland forward claimed he was injured, but he was fit enough to be back on club duty three days later against Liverpool.

There is little an international manager can do in these situations, and the players know it. Bentley and Stokes were chastised in public and threatened with permanent exclusion from their national squads, but these were hollow threats. No manager wants to wilfully deprive himself of his best players and both will be welcomed back sooner rather than later.

In Bentley's case, his reward is likely to be a call-up to the full England set-up, although many would argue that is punishment enough.

Even by the standards of international football, there is a particularly exquisite anguish to be found in leading the Three Lions. Steve McClaren must now feel like the poor sap who books himself into a swanky beach resort after being dazzled by the glossy brochure, only to find that his five-star hotel is a building site and the beach is covered in sewage and syringes. The dream job he fought so hard to win has turned into an excruciating nightmare, and in record time.

McClaren has never been able to disguise his rank discomfort on the world stage. The relentlessly dazzling smiles, which were humorous at first, are now just plain creepy and he has already committed the cardinal sin of cracking in front of a notoriously unforgiving press corps, storming out of his post-match news conference in Andorra last season.

McClaren's immediate aim when he took charge of England in August 2006 was to distance himself, in every way possible, from his predecessor. But if ever there was a man capable of delivering sage advice on dealing with the stifling pressures of the England hothouse, it is surely Sven Goran Eriksson.

The Swede is not a fantastic coach. His tactics were predictable and his substitutions uninspired. And his public demeanour was frostier than a Gothenburg winter. But there was never any doubt he saw international management, with its €7-million-a-year salary and jet-set lifestyle, as a pleasure rather than a chore, especially as he delivered results that always verged on the right side of satisfactory.

The impeccably polite Eriksson would never subscribe to Wenger's gloomy assessment of an international manager's lot. But that is not to say he would go back to it: having spent five years attempting to shoehorn square pegs into round holes with England, he is revelling in the freedoms afforded him by Thaksin Shinawatra's millions at Manchester City.

He will spend the coming weekend with his feet up, happy to leave the suffering to those now in the frontline - poor, wandering souls like McClaren.