Heard that stat today and tbh it shocked me. Now im not one of these people who thinks its a bad thing we have a lot of players from abroad but christ, it says a lot that not even a fifth of our league is made up of english talent. I think it shows how **** we are tbh. I mean this country is football mad, its by far the number one sport and we cannot produce one world class player. We cant even produce enough quantity it now seems. When you consider that virtually none of our players play abroad either, its a pretty damming statistic. How can we not produce enough players from our own country of a high enough standard when so much is pumped into youth academies? As i say I love the foreign players in the PL they bring, grace, technique and pretty on the eye football, but christ we really need to start pulling our fingers out and start teaching english kids how to play football.
Kick and rush, tall and fast and strong and no flamboyance is stressed into young kids here. So what do you expect, they are not taught to smile and laugh and do tricks but to only win the game in any fashion. Soon as this changes then you will see top talents.
To be fair we are a pretty small country, we do decently considering our size. However I would like to see our young players learn to be more technical
I think the actual stat is that one weekend only 70 players in the starting line up across all PL clubs were English. So that's 70 out of 220 players. In general, around 40% of players in the PL are English. Not really. England has a higher population than Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and Argentina. And ten times higher than Denmark. Only France, Germany, Italy and Russia have higher populations than England in Europe. The problem we have is that the PL is so commercialised that all clubs are more concerned with finding good quality overseas players rather than developing home grown players. In Spain, outside the top 2 all the other clubs are focused on developing local talent rather than just buying in quick fixes. Similarly in the Netherlands, where Ajax has had a top quality academy primarily for Dutch kids for over thirty years now. In the UK, most clubs have only developed top class academies over the past ten years or so, and have focused them on attracting players from all over the world. And our national coaching infrastructure is currently being built at Burton. Probably...
Very true. I've ranted about how the coaching badges in this country are more a curse than a blessing as they tend to produce coaches who focus on fitness, hard running and of course sheer strength. They focus so much on the collective that individualism is frowned upon. Don't get me wrong. I don't want to see a bunch of Taarabts running about, guys who would rather do a trick and take on the world than use their teammates. There needs to be a balance though and there isn't. I find it hard to stomach that we haven't tried to learn from the Spanish and Germans and at least attemtped to take the best bits from their 2 youth coaching philosophies and incorporate them into the British game. It wouldn't bring instant results but would likely bring some over time. Fergie and Wenger were winning trophies long before these badges came into being and that says a lot in my view.
I think too much is being made of English youngsters having the skill coached out of them. If you speak to anybody who works with young, promising players (especially at the higher end of the game), you'll be told that a much more continental style is being taught these days.
Cos they've only been using the more continental style for the past ten or twelve years or so, since France '98 and Euro 2000 showed us how far behind everyone else we were. So Wilshire, Ramsey, Rodwell et al are the first group to have really been brought up in this way. Hopefully they'll make a difference over the next few years.
There are some very skilfull young English players come through, we need look no further than our own Ravel Morrison. If he can sort his head out, he should be a very good player. It has taken time, but it appears to be bearing fruit now.
Worst thing about that is the best player on the list is welsh. Not that its a bad thing to be welsh or anything, merely that it means the english national team wont benefit.
To interested in wanting to be a wannabe gangster, witness intimadtion apparently and stealing players watches aswell as bullying other youth and reserve team players.
Stick him in a room with our first team captain for 5 minutes for a bit of re-education Eastern-bloc style.
