Glen Hoddle - The future of England Football

The issue is the lack of top young English talent at the top clubs.

The U21 side tends to be full of players from the lower end of tbe Premier League and Championship.

For whatever reason, the best young English talent isn't gravtiating towards the best clubs. That's going to be an issue when Spain's best players are Barcelona level, Germany's are Bayern level and England's are Fulham level.

 

England team from Man Utd and Man City:

Hart

Richards
Ferdinand
Lescott
?????

Cleverley
Barry

Young
Rooney
Milner

Wellbeck

Subs

Sinclair

Germany team from Bayern and Dortmund:

Neuer

Lahm
Hummels
Badstuber
Schmelzer

Schweinsteiger
Kroos

Götze
Müller
Reus

Gomez

Subs
Weidenfeller
Boateng
Gundogan
Bender
Kehl
Leitner
Scheiber

There's an enormous gulf in quality.

 

Missing Carrick, Jones, Powell, Zaha and Smalling from United

 

United actually have the ability to put a fairly decent team together with just English players. The only position we lack is a LB and a decent keeper

Amos

Smalling
Jones
Rio
----

Carrick
Cleverly
Young
Zaha

Welbeck
Rooney

 

In England the talent is spread out more widely, with mid level clubs than in Germany or Spain, tbf.

That's more down to likes of Everton or Spurs holding on too Baines or Bale etc.. longer or for more expensive prices than they would in Spain once big boys come knocking. That hardly means that they aren't top quality players. Baines is a improvement on either Evra or Clichy. Wilshere is a improvement on Cleverley or Barry. Jagielka will be a improvement on Lescott probably and so on....

Then there are more clubs with spending power for young British talent which then causes them to be overpriced and not possible to stockpile at one or 2 clubs. Though United and Arsenal in recent times are trying actually by buying them a stage younger.

 

The price of english talent has been massively inflated for a little while now. It's another big problem

 

Major brainfart on my part.

 

That's due to the 90 minute restriction and compensation rules regarding English talent though.

From a Club POV it made sense to recruit from abroad at 16, if they couldn't find enough top talents in the given radius. The higher up the table the club is, the requirement of type of talents they need becomes higher too and less likely to be fulfilled only by players from a certain radius.

Plus there is the whole question of do you count the other Home Nation's players as foreign?

 

That's my point though. In England the talent is spread far too thinly and not enough of the top English players play for the top clubs.

You would expect Bayern Munich or Barcelona to hump Everton at club level and that's the level England are at in comparison to the top teams IMO.

 

Yeh the system doesn't help our national team whatsoever. The thing is we keep making excuses and not actually trying to do anything about it

 

Clubs just buy a house for the parents of talented kids so they fall within this 90 minute radius.

 

The English national team does well in spite of the Premier League.

In Germany they made massive changes to their youth programs in the wake of Euro 2000 (a tournament in which they along with England were utterly terrible in). For some reason, German clubs seem more able to act in the wider interest of the game. Then there's the issue of coaches (somewhere where England lag miles behind) and facilities, which are a disgrace in the UK compared to Europe.

 

What really needs to happen is we get a group of former players & managers, the heads of the FA & PL and some club ambassadors to try and find a solution that benefits everyone. Changes do need to happen imo but the FA are in a position now where they cant introduce new legislation that will significantly impact the PL in one hit because there are too many important stakeholders they need to keep happy.

 

The German system is stacked with Germans though. In the UK we have English clubs with foreign owners, foreign managers and a whole host of foreign players that have no care in the world for the England National Team.

Add to that we have 3 seperate organisations running the show in the FA, the PL and the football league. There's no unification over here

 

What's really needed is a change in financial and ownership rules. Without that you're never going to find a solutio that benefits everyone because clubs will act in their own selfish interests. Clubs aren't filling their academies with foreigners because of the 90 minute rule (no club in England is so geographically isolated that the rule leaves then with a shortage of locally available talent), they're filling them with foreigners because it's easier to do that than develop your own players from the age of 8. The same foreigners then struggle to break into the first team (see Chelsea) because it's easier to spend £25m on a first team ready player.

One factor that's often overlooked when looking at what's happened in Germany over the last 10-15 years is the bankruptcy of the company that held the TV rights in 2002ish. That more than anything else convinced the Bundesliga teams that the way they were operating - over paying for mediocre foreign players - wasn't sustainable. The fact that they'd overhauled tbeir youth systems and started to produce top quality young players at around the same time was a happy coincidence.

Loom at the criticism someone like Wenger gets. What realistic chance do Arsenal have when their look to the future, sustainable model can be blown away by City and Chelsea's billions?

 

And nothing in England epitomises the short termist view of the clubs more than the managerial merry go round. Granted, the list of longest serving managers is skewed by Ferguson retiring and Moyes taking over, but 3/20 clubs having their manager for more than 2 years isn't a parricularly flash stat either.

 

Chelsea and City have completely fucked the Premier League over imo. Sure it's made it a bit more exciting than the usual Arsenal United monopoly of the late 90s/early 2000s but financially the other clubs are now having to spends a ridiculous amount to compete.

Tottenham, Arsenal and Everton are never going to win the league because they run a sustainable wage structure. Now all the top talent wants to be paid the same as those at the top 3 clubs who can afford to run wage budgets 2-3 times that of the clubs below them. If you look at Dortmund they got to the CL final and won the league 2 years in a row using a model not to dissimilar to Arsenals because they nearly went bust a few years ago.

I think we need to start getting stricter on these financial fairplay rules internally and then we can start looking at trying to enforce more homegrown rules.

 

Well, this discussion is going on a different somewhat unrelated tangent here.

 

Still loosely connected...

Overinflation of the Premier League transfer market is partially to blame for the inflation of English players imo

 

Not at all.

The Premier League is the biggest obstacle to the England national team.