Why England Can't Win
By Mark Daniell
28/06/2010
Right well we all knew this day was coming, and in that way at least it’s a little easier to take. It’s not as if we’ve been robbed of the World Cup, after performances like the mind-altering 1-1 against the USA, the exhilarating 0-0 against Algeria, and the crotch-moistening 1-0 win against Slovenia, no one really believed we had enough in the tank to win the tournament. Not even Terry Venables. Even the fashion of our exit, in a record defeat to the Germans, is tempered somewhat by the knowledge that the result would have been very different if the linesman had not chosen a vital moment to flick off into a reverie of his Uruguayan childhood with sleek, shiny horses cantering across green fields and mama’s cooking and the pretty daughter of the postman who sat at the front of the class and would sometimes... What? What was that? No, I didn’t see it cross the line. No goal!
This is what should have happened: we should have played against Ghana, and then Uruguay. We should have reached the semi-finals and fluked a win over an injury-ravaged Dutch side whose pyrrhic victory over the Brazilians had depleted them to the point of playing Dirky Kuyt alone up front. We should have then beaten them in the match of our lives, partied all the way to the final and not given two monkeys when we lost 4-1 to the Germans because of a disallowed goal. That’s what should have happened. But it didn’t. And mainly because of Landon Donovan.
It’s okay though, we’ve got two years to delude ourselves into believing we’re really a top ten side and a further two to believe we can beat the world. And we will, of course. We’ll do that easily. And we’ll only realise it was a delusion when the bill comes for a five hundred pound TV that has been reduced in price by thirty quid because England could only muster three World Cup goals.
How come this keeps happening? Where are we going wrong? Should we have an English manager? Would it make any difference? Should we have fewer foreigners in the Premier League? Should we have more English players playing overseas and learning different perspectives on the game? We are currently the only side along with North Korea where 100% of the national team plays at home. Not only that, The England team very nearly doesn’t have a single player who has ever played overseas. Only one member of our World Cup squad has played club football outside of England. Can you name him?
At the last count, the Premier League was made up of 61% foreign players. It’s the international hub of world football. Players from all countries come and earn big bucks, showboat and net lucrative sponsorship deals before returning home. It makes for excellent viewing and certainly helps all the players taking part. Take for example the Spanish team: Torres, Alonso, Fabregas, just three key players who have learnt not only from the Spanish league but also from a stint against the international crowd.
This is fine, it’s a good thing even, as it means there is a league of international football that provides the most entertaining club spectacle in the world. It has created something that never existed: a showcase of the world’s talent on display every weekend. If this happened on an island in the Mediterranean then it would be perfect. If it took place in Luxembourg then everybody wins. But the trouble is, it’s happened in England and it has replaced our own club football.
Not only do our players now have no incentive to go overseas and experience different styles of play, but younger players have almost no chance of cutting their teeth at their highest domestic level. It’s no surprise: if you managed a Premiership side and knew a bad year would almost certainly result in your sacking and relegation could lead to insolvency, would you take a chance on an untried teenager or would you scour the global market to loan in a proven player?
If English football isn’t being affected by the Premier League, why then is Paul Scholes being asked to return to play for England? Or Jaime Carragher recalled after three years international retirement? Why are we stopping gaps in defence with gambles like Ledley King? The three hundred and fifty one foreigners (out of five hundred and seventy five Premiership players) are squeezing out the opportunities for young English players and leaving gaping holes in the national side. Not only that, but when the number of players in your squad is down to a minimum, their desire to play is affected. We all know Rooney underperformed, and we’ve seen Gerrard and Lampard fail in midfield countless times, but Capello can’t drop them because he has no one to replace them. Off-form players know it doesn’t matter what they do, they’ll never be dropped, which goes some way to explaining the lack of passion in their play, the ease which which they shrug and say, ah well... If you don’t have to work for something it’s much easier to let it slip away.
In the Premier League the pool of England talent is drying out like a daub of tippex, but unlike tippex, we’re enjoying watching it dry. You can’t get angry at players for the money they earn. You can’t say, John Terry gets paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a week, he should do better! What you can do is drop him from the starting line-up. That’s all you can do. Except, of course, England can’t.
This is what will happen now: Chelsea, Liverpool or Manchester United will buy Ozil this summer. He’ll play for two, three years, then return to his home league. He’ll benefit from the experience, the German national side will benefit from the experience, and some German youngster at Weder Bremen will benefit from the experience. And we’ll benefit from being able to watch him every week and say we watch the most exciting league in the world. We do. But it comes at a cost.
The Premier League is an anomaly, it’s the champagne football hub of the world for international superstars. The fact that thirty-eight percent of the players are English is incidental, they make up the numbers in weaker sides and less influential positions. Of the significant players, only a handful are English. The Premiership has usurped our top division. Because of it, our real top domestic division is The Championship, which I would say sits somewhere between tenth and twentieth in the list of world leagues, so about right for what we can expect as a country.
We can remedy this in two ways: dismantle the Premier League as it stands by limiting the number of foreign players. This will reduce the quality of football and artificially influence the pay of players. It will also get rid of an enterprise which is basically a global license to print money, so it won’t happen. The alternative is to take the Champions League and turn it into a genuine league, where the European elite plays every week and the domestic leagues must battle to qualify. This idea has been mooted before, but remains on the sidelines because of claims it will cheapen domestic leagues. Would fans forsake their local sides in favour of Barcelona or Bayern Munich? No more so than they do already. The truth is the only league that stands to lose from such a venture is the one it would replace: the Premiership, which could only benefit England.
The only England player to have played overseas is Peter Crouch who made eight appearances on loan at IFK Hasselholm in Sweden.