As a point of note. The Premier league brought in home grown quota in 2010/11 Uefa forced this in 2008/09 Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) introduced in 2012 mandated clubs to have academies. We are sat here talking about England teams performances 10 to 15 years later. Now 2+2 might just equal 4 here. There's no coincidence between homegrown rules and teams generating more and more talent The Premier league clubs have done more and more rather than just buying all the time but equally when you look at that England u21 squad you find players out in foreign teams and still players from lover divisions. This is a symptom of the world of agents and quick bucks as well as better academies around the league.
whilst fully agreeing that that HC/CG rules and particularly academies have improved the technical prowess of players i don't get the point i've highlighted
I'm just saying that in the 1990 and 2000s England always had a shortage of players in certain positions. There was a time where there were very few as a % of the playing squads. Now you have a healthy enough grouping to have options that get enough games to come on. Konsa was in that u20 team. He could have vanished but he got games and played and move on up. Clubs are fighting over English players like Trafford, others like henderson have gotten games and chances that otherwise they might not have. England have enough options to push fading players like sterling out which is great. The standard is not necessarily as high as in Spain but there's enough numbers at least.
The 1990 side seemed pretty damn strong in all areas, as I remember. Except goalie, perhaps, as Shilton -who in the 70s was on par, if not better than Clem, IMO- was probably 5 years past his best. Beaasant was on the bench though, IIRC.
Out of idle curiosity, how much money have city just lost by going out of last 16? Or should I say what side deal was done for that saudi side to get to the last stages?
By reaching the R16 earned around £10m in prize money and get between £9m-£27m for participating (this bit is unclear as it's based on some made up fifa bs ranking) Suggestion is they earned the full whack of participation money though. So they've made £37m ish. The Winner gets £30m just for winning the final though. I worked it out that a top ranked European team could have earned about £110m by winning it
Madness that that money is deliberately being doped into the have type clubs and not being used to "develop" football globally. But yeah they just lost a shed load.
The only way they can make this attractive, and to give it a veneer of legitimate competitiveness is to throw money at the big clubs so it becomes financially worthwhile. Otherwise I think most European clubs would just send a cobbled-together squad and go through the motions. Latin American clubs like it, and now the Middle-East is using it in an effort to look relevant.
Far be it from me to put words (or anything) into mito's mouth, I read it as him saying the number of English players at foreign clubs is a symptom of the activities of agents. I could be spectacularly wrong, of course.