In new stats, just over 31% of players in the EPL are English: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/24467371 Is Jack gonna come out now and say he thinks only English players should play in the premier league? Fact is, the lack of English players is down to 2 reasons: 1-Quality is quite ****, who'd you rather have, Cazorla, Ozil etc or? 2- English players are way over-priced, this is what I don't get, they complain about lack of English activity in the transfer market, well **** me, are you surprised when every English player costs so much? Zaha, a good player in the championship, how much did he cost United? How much did OXO and Walcott cost for us, when they were just young players with flashes of quality? You can't talk about a lack of English players being bought when their prices are bloody ****ing high. As Wenger says: "There are only two ways you can see it - you have the opportunity to have the best players in the world in England, so let's see what they have and let's produce players who have the same qualities. Or you say, let's protect our players, keep the good players out and let's just play the English players. I believe that we live in a global world. The real question for English football is whether it can produce the players with the needed quality." Either keep the world class players coming, or say we don't want them, and allow the quality of the EPL to drop down, thereby losing it's great marketing and popularity which makes it so much $$$.
How many people support their national team over their club team? Not many I'd wager. So therefore... who cares...
Unfortunately this is so true. Our football industry is so screwed-up and thus the will to change things from the bottom up is only amongst the few. Radical change is needed to help develop the English game on the international front - but radical change is not what our footballing authorities are about unless it comes with huge personal benefits-ie little brown envelopes stuffed with readies.
I don't know any other job where people get worked up about foreigners taking the jobs of English people (and if they do, it makes them appear unsavoury). Why should clubs be forced to play lower quality players that will undoubtedly cost them more? Most clubs have loads of british youngsters in their youth teams so presumably pay a lot for their training. Yet, there aren't many coming through that are truly world class. Blame the English players. If they're not as good as foreign players then that's their fault. They shouldn't get a free ride and be shoe horned into premier league clubs just because they can represent a national team that not many people care about. All you have to do is look at Tom Cleverley to see an example of someone only making so many appearances for their club because they're English.
You would think that the lowering of quality would also demolish the reputation and profitability of both the league and the clubs - all to take a punt on the idea that it would make English players better (which of course there's no guarantee of). I can't imagine any club owner, shareholder or board of directors buying into the idea for this very reason.
Obvious Statement of the Day Award: Good call, Craig. The problem is, as you know, that there are no Scottish footballers good enough to play at the highest level. It's like me saying: 'If I had a fanny I'd be a woman'.
Just because you prefer your club team it doesn't mean you shouldn't care if the national team is going down the pan. I think most English people would support the England team a lot more if we hadn't been served up crap football by all of our recent managers. I definitely think we need some match day quota of English players for the PL. Not sure how that would work for Cardiff or Swansea but there definitely isn't enough emphasis in bringing through English players in the top flight. Youth systems in general seem to be pretty poor in the top flight. It's all very well buying the best prospects from around the World and some of them turning out good but that's not really bringing them through your youth system. In an ideal World the PL would've made the huge rise in TV revenue dependent on a certain amount of investment in the youth system because we're still producing quality players but they're few and far between.
I believe we (Cardiff) have the most English players of all 20 PL clubs. Saying that I have no problem whatsoever with there being more foreigners. I don't agree that there should be quotas for English/British players. If they're good enough they'll play but generally they aren't. The problem is we aren't creating enough talented youth players with good technique. Instead we find big, strong lumps and teach them to play football, rather than letting the ones with the technique develop. I think England (and Wales) would be much better off if we encouraged our top youngsters to go abroad to Spain/Italy/Germany to learn their trade rather than over here.
Yes, but that's kind of irrelevant. Everyone wants to support a national team who wins the world cup. But just because our English players are pap, does that mean they have more of a right to play in premier league football teams?? Completely counter-productive to reward mediocrity... it wouldn't allow us to have more technically gifted players. We'd just have more pap in the premier league. I'm not really sure why there should be. Spain don't have anything official in place and still manage to be the best team in the world. Our problem isn't that our players aren't good enough to get many games in the prem... it's that they're not good enough to be wanted by teams abroad. There's hundreds of other top league clubs to play for abroad... why do we have to create spaces for our players in the premier league? Surely any top flight league will develop a player regardless of which country it's in. Again, if they're good enough, they'll play in a top league... somewhere. Don't really agree with that. Arsenal's youth team is always full of english players. Hardly any of them make it because eventually they're just not good enough. It's not like they're being kicked out of the youth team by foreigners. The issue is grass roots football promoting Andy Carroll type players. Who's England's most technically gifted player? Wilshere? Sturridge? Not exactly up there with players like Messi, Ronaldo, Ozil, Robben, Ribery, Sneijder, Van Persie, Neymar, Ibrahimovic...
Time we merged England and Wales FAs. Logical step given Swansea, Cardiff, Wrexham, Newport all play in "English" Leagues, so we should have an England and Wales Football team - like Cricket. Is this just a ploy to get Bale and Ramsay into the England team? Possibly.
I wasn't talking about winning the World Cup but if we played more attractive football then we'd see a greater interest from our country's fans. Supporting England these days is hard work because we have manager after manager getting us playing dour football with the same old failures. Spain probably don't need a quota then, just like we didn't if you go back 15 years ago. The idea behind quotas is that it increases the number of chances for English players. You can debate whether that will have an immediate impact on the players coming through, or that English players simply aren't good enough ao they'll weaken sides - that's not what I'm interested in. The reasons we're falling so far behind is the whole system of developing homegrown players is broken. PL clubs are taking the trend one way, less homegrown players. If PL clubs are forced to take bringing through homegrown players as a greater priority then it will happen. It's not something the FA can do by bringing in more young coaches, or whatever other ideas they have, it can only be solved by PL clubs putting in their own money and efforts, and they're not known for their philanthropy so a push is needed. I wasn't saying that homegrown youth players weren't getting a chance at that level because of foreigners, I was making the point that those that might be considered as good youth systems(such as yours) aren't actually bringing through many players that haven't been developed elsewhere initially. When you look at other clubs around Europe, no matter whether they're at the top of the table, or the bottom, they have players that have been at the club since they were 11/12 or even earlier. Apart from Wilshere, who has done that for you? You're signing some of the best youngsters around the UK and Europe, not creating them. Rooney's very good technically and certainly better than the two you mentioned, at least. What does "grass rooots" mean? These days PL clubs take on kids from about 6/7 years old, if they're not getting the right training at "grass roots" level then it's the fault of clubs youth teams, isn't it? Hence my criticism of them. You're right that the culture has been wrong for a long time with English football but that is coming right. One final point, if PL clubs simply aren't giving young, English players the chance because they're not good enough then why is Thomas Ince getting released by Liverpool only to be chased by PL clubs, including Liverpool, a year later? It's easy to assume the only reason English players aren't getting played in the Premier League because they're not good enough but it's clearly a flawed assumption. How many times have we seen teams get promoted with English players who then go on to establish themselves as good PL sides? Either playing in the PL is helping them raise their game or they were good enough to start with when they were playing in the Championship.
There are also other Welsh teams in the English pyramid system.The system of Welsh teams playing in England has worked well for years so I don't think there is any need for the English & Welsh FA's to merge
