Summer sales….grab your bargains! English club managers and owners prefer to buy non-English players and that is contributing to our lack of success in any major tournament for 50 years and leads us to consider reaching the Quarter finals as a benchmark for success nowadays.
Euro 2016 or as some like to call it ‘The summer football sales!’ will see some of the best European players on view and many managers and club owners sitting discreetly in the stands with open cheque books as soon as someone turns in a good performance. Unfortunately most of these managers and representatives will be from English football clubs and this is one of the main contributing factors as to why English football no longer finds success on the world stage. We don’t give our own players a chance to prove themselves.
A report done earlier this year by Drs Raffaele Poli, Loïc Ravenel and Roger Besson from CIES Football Observatory, shows the following percentages of foreign players in the main European leagues:
England 66.4
Belgium 59.1
Italy 57.9
Portugal 55.6
Germany 50.1
Spain 41.6
Netherlands 35.5
France 33.9
English football as you can clearly see has more than two thirds of foreign players and while this makes the English Premier League as one of the best and most competitive in the world, it does not help English players develop or showcase their talents and most of them will linger in the lower leagues. We may have Hazard, Aguero, Silva, Fabregas, Giroud, Willian, Martial and many many more great and naturally gifted players but what effect is it having on our home grown players? Look at the Chelsea youth team, they are winning everything in sight…European champions two years in a row , English Youth cup winners for 4 out of the last 5 years. And the players? It’s well documented they have not been given much of a chance in the first team albeit temporarily when Guus Hiddink came on board for a few months but now with the Italian Conte taking over soon, there is no guarantee these top British youngsters will get off the bench unless it’s a loan spell to Belgium or the Championship or somewhere else where they will slowly disappear out of sight!
English football is Stoke City, it’s Burnley, it’s Leeds and Blackburn….it’s rough and tough and extremely intense and we need to accept that and embrace it. We need Alan Shearers and Wayne Rooneys and Andy Carrolls, players that can mix it and score great goals too. Yes we have had John Barnes and Glen Hoddle in the past and we have Sterling and Sturridge in the present, both with natural ability but they look lost on the world stage. What we need for success now is Milner and Carroll and Terry and Rooney the guys who battle like Terry Butcher and Tony Adams used to do, not Deli Alli and Sterling who play pretty football but just disappear in big games. We need a team literally going to war! The mix of dazzling continental skills with our own English players hasn’t helped the game here at all. What you see now is English defenders like Ryan Shawcross or Ashley Barnes just hacking down anything they can’t understand!
And how do we know it’s not helping our players, well who can forget David Dunn’s attempted Rabona a few years ago, Â something that will always top many people’s funniest ever football moments!
