As though we need to hear it a
gain, BBC Sport leads today on study it commissioned into the amount of English footballers playing in the Premiership. It will inevitably be solid newspaper filler for the coming days, in place of those Euro 2008 wall charts we would be pinning up had, well, all number of things been done differently.
Many have argued England’s failure to reach Austria & Switzerland is due to this record low in domestic players, but there are certain facts that seem to be consistently omitted by those who further this point of view.
The story leads on the “big slide” (3.9%, or 21 players) in the number of Englishmen who played Premiership football last season compared to 2006-7 campaign. It is frankly ludicrous to suggest that these 21 fewer English players have had any baring on the fate of the national team, especially when you consider that Michael Tongue and Darren Ambrose were among their numbers.
Fabio Capello was sensible enough not to be drawn on the figures, and said: “But more important is quality – the level of the player. At the moment the total is 34% but the (quality) level is high.”
And of course this is true. The Premier League is streets ahead of any other division in the world at the moment. When the BBC talk about “just 34.1%” of players being English, we should perhaps be delighting in the fact that a third of the players which make up the most dominant league in the world hail from England. No other country gets close to that figure.
It is not as though English players are not getting opportunities. If you have any footballing ability in this country, it is likely you will be snapped up by a club and given some of the best training in the world. English players are not forced abroad to play on a bigger stage. Indeed, there is not one top quality English footballer plying their trade outside the Premier League (no, David Beckham does not count.) But at the end of the day, how many Premier League games you give Titus Bramble, he is not suddenly going to transform into a world class player. If anything, there are a disproportionate amount of English players playing at the top level.
Lets look at last week’s Champions League final. The game is undeniably the height of club football world wide and is the culmination of a tournament which arguably features a higher quality of football than even the World Cup. Now between the 22 starters last Wednesday, 10 (or 45%) were English. Not a single Brazilian or Italian started the game, and only one German and just three Frenchmen. Isn’t this an era of unparalleled English domin
ance in terms of the global footballing talent pool.
Many of the criticisms come from an atrociously run FA, jealous of the increasing power Richard Scudamore’s Premier League is gaining in world football. There is some hope for England, especially with Fabio Capello in charge, but one does still worry about how much damage to the national team Brian Barwick and co at Soho Square will do.
The reason England did not qualify for Euro 2008 is quite simple. They were abysmally managed by a man as incompetent as he was out of depth. Ultimate blame on the decision to appoint McClaren in the first place of course should have been passed on Barwick, but nevertheless he survived with his job in tact.
The foreign invasion on English football has arguably aided the quality of home grown players, and the English have caught up with their continental counterparts immeasurably in terms of technical ability in the last 15 years.
The fact of the matter is England has one of the best pools of talent in world football to select from. Ferdinand, Terry, Gerrard, Joe Cole, Rooney, Ashley Cole, Lampard, Carrick and Hargreaves are undoubtedly top quality players, who have consistently proved they CAN be world beaters, just not when playing for England. The focus needs to placed on getting the best out them, rather than xenophobic concerns about foreign imports.
