http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2007/03/28/the_premiership_feasts_while_e.html
The Premiership feasts while England flounder The national team's troubles
can be traced back to the formation of the Premier League and the resulting
influx of foreign stars.
David Conn
March 28, 2007 12:55 AM
In June 1991, when the Football Association supported the plot by England's
First Division clubs to break away from sharing money with those in the other
three divisions, they promised it was to improve the England team. All in
football knew the decision was really infested by politics: the big clubs were
determined to keep the millions about to pour in from satellite television,
while the FA wanted to smash the Football League to win a dreary administrative
turf war of its own.
So the FA produced its Blueprint for the Future of Football, a flabby
document obsessing about fans' disposable income, with one explosive
recommendation at its core: that the top clubs should be allowed to have their
separate Premier League.
"The prospects of success for the England Team would, at once, be enhanced,"
the blueprint proclaimed, although it never convincingly explained how.
The plan was that the First Division clubs would break free of the Football
League and its century-old system of sharing money between large and small. The
new Premier League would shrink to 18 clubs by 1996-97, allowing for fewer
matches, fresher players and more time for international get-togethers.
Improved, overhauled coaching would help power the England team to the top of
the world.
English football's renaissance after Hillsborough had begun a year earlier,
when England overcame a turgid start to gallop to the semi-final of the 1990
World Cup in Italy, ultimately, undeservedly, going out to Germany on penalties.
Fifteen years on from the formation of the Premier League the 20 clubs -
slimmed from 22 but never as far as 18 - are triumphant; bank accounts poised
to accept the first slug of next year's barely believable £2.7bn TV deal.
Several chairmen-owners who agitated originally for the breakaway have made
millions by selling out to businessmen queuing up for a share of the game's
global media revenues. On the field Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool,
all foreign-owned, crowd the last eight of the Champions League.
Yet internationally England have never matched that 1990 performance,
achieved before the Premier League was formed supposedly to improve the team.
The current players stumble about like strangers, denounced by a crowd scorning
the money they make. For the superstars of the Premiership Andorra is a massive
game.
The reasons for this are many, although we should not overstate the
difference between the 1990 achievement and now: England reached the semi-final
then only thanks to David Platt's injury-time volley against Belgium and two
Gary Lineker penalties in the quarter final against Cameroon. In the two most
recent major tournaments England have made it to the quarter-finals, only to go
out on penalties. Perhaps a manager other than Steve McClaren would be wresting
inspired, joined-up performances from today's team; perhaps not.
Last weekend Trevor Brooking, the FA's technical director, lamented that the
English game lacks talent in depth, pointing out that, with no Ashley Cole,
Wayne Bridge or Gary Neville, England had no recognised right- or left-back to
play against Israel. He might also have noticed a hole where a creative
midfielder ought to be, the lack - Stewart Downing apart - of a left-footed
attacking midfield player and, with Michael Owen still injured, the absence of
an internationally feared striker to play alongside the moody Wayne Rooney.
There is one clear reason for this shortage of players to choose from: the
paucity of English footballers turning out at all in the Premiership. When the
Premiership's "whole new ball game" kicked off in 1992-93, flush with the first
TV deal, worth £305m, only 11 non-British players featured in all the clubs'
starting line-ups. Of the first-choice players lining up for the four top clubs
in the most recent Premiership matches a week and a half ago only 11 were
English. Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand, Michael Carrick and Rooney started
Manchester United's 4-1 win over Bolton; John Terry, Ashley Cole, Shaun
Wright-Phillips and Frank Lampard began Chelsea's 3-0 victory over Sheffield
United; only Justin Hoyte started for Arsenal against Everton while in
Liverpool's side that played Aston Villa only Jamie Carragher and Steven
Gerrard were English.
After 1992, as the money grew, English clubs could pay to attract world
stars; Jurgen Klinsmann, Gianfranco Zola and Juninho were among the first to
fire the imagination and clubs began to compete to hunt overseas talent. Top
players, such as Lampard, point out how much they have improved by playing
alongside the world's greats but opportunities for the next generation of
English players have become painfully limited. The link between the top
division and the rest has been broken not only financially but in terms of
players' careers. Those who came so close on the world stage in 1990 learned
their craft gradually, gaining experience mostly in the lower divisions or
even, as with Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle, in non-league football. Now
Premier League clubs rarely take a chance on players from the Football League
while the non-leagues - the odd DJ Campbell aside - are another country.
Top managers, releasing dozens of players every year who have come through
their academies, grapple with sporting and financial stakes so high that they
cannot afford to "blood" young players in the way they used to. The money is
there to buy ready-made stars, the scouting extends for the most promising
youngsters all over the world, so only truly outstanding English players at 16
have a hope of breaking through at the top clubs - and even then, as Theo
Walcott is finding, games are limited.
In 1997, flush with the commercial success that followed the Premier League's
launch, Howard Wilkinson produced his Charter for Quality, overhauling youth
football in favour of the big clubs. Now crowds of boys from as young as eight
are signed into clubs' academies, taken out of the school and youth teams that
traditionally drilled English talent. For years teachers and youth coaches
complained that the trawl is too wide and the coaching too uncertain to justify
it - quite apart from the fact that at the same time the clubs have gone
shopping for foreign players and so drastically reduced first-team
opportunities for their own young graduates. The Premier League waved these
objections away, although its head of youth development, Dave Richardson, did
admit more recently that the clubs were not sure how to recruit the right
players, or coach them, so young.
Now, 10 years on, a review is under way, in which the clubs' argue that they
should be allowed to enlist boys from further afield, at younger ages, and not
be restricted to local English players.
Contrary to the disingenuous rhetoric about the England team which ushered it
in, the Premier League has undermined, rather than boosted, the FA's authority.
Clubs are consumed by their own ambitions, not England's, and a period of
European domination appears within reach now of those cosmopolitan squads. The
England team, stocked with the few homegrown players to come through, and
managed by one of only a handful of Englishmen even remotely qualified, comes
round as an occasional embarrassment, raising a few difficult questions, all to
be comfortably forgotten when Saturday comes.
Humble origins
None of the players in the England team that reached the World Cup semi-final
in 1990 spent his formative years at the biggest clubs:
Peter Shilton Began career at Leicester City, 1966-74, including two seasons
in the Second Division
Paul Parker Played at Fulham in the Second and Third Divisions, 1982-87,
before joining QPR in the First
Stuart Pearce Played his first five seasons for non-league Wealdstone before
joining Coventry in 1983
Des Walker Spent the first nine years of his career with Nottingham Forest
Terry Butcher Made his England debut in 1980 while at Ipswich
Mark Wright Played for Oxford before joining First Division Southampton in
1982
David Platt Played his first three seasons for Crewe in the Fourth Division
Chris Waddle Played for Tow Law Town in the Northern League before Newcastle
signed him in 1980
Paul Gascoigne Came through at Newcastle United in 1985, then struggling to
stay in the First Division
Peter Beardsley Began league career at Carlisle in Third Division, 1979-82
Gary Lineker Made his first 214 appearances for Leicester, 1978-85
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