This is a subject that has been receiving a lot of attention of late, not just in the media but from within the games' governing bodies, concerns have been raised and opinions voiced about the possible dangers lurking for the future of the game in this country.
It is a subject on which Football England obviously feel very strongly. We too are concerned and our fears are manifold. This article will address some of those worries, though probably nowhere near all of them.
The first thing to establish here is what I, personally, mean by English football.
To me English football doesn't mean Manchester United and Chelsea and Liverpool etc. and the Premier League. These clubs and the league they play in are obviously in rude health, living the life of luxury thanks to Sky's billions and a clutch of foreign investors.
Most of these clubs, and the league itself, will survive and go on to thrive even if Sky and their wealthy backers decide to pull the plug sometime in the future.
It is not this that bothers me.
To me English football means the English national side, English football players and, more than anything else, a way of playing.
Although I am particularly concerned with England we may as well call it Britain. The traditions and style of playing football has always been the same within these isles and whereas I had no problem whatsoever with the proliferation of Scots, Welsh and Irish who used to populate our clubs; I am nowhere near as enamoured of the invasion of foreigners we now have.
When anyone talks about an English, or British, way of playing everybody understands exactly what is meant.
The images conjured are of blood and thunder, hard tackling, fast, furious, whole hearted football.
It is an image which has come to be derided in many places and, as a nation, we are being encouraged to disown and be embarrassed by it.
We are being assailed from every angle with the "fact" that our football is backward and ineffective. That we are labourers rather than craftsmen.
It is an opinion that I do not share and never will.
The latest person throwing fuel on the fire was Trevor Brooking who went into great detail in describing the way our coaching at youth level lags behind the continent.
Basically, he reckoned, we don't get our boys at a young enough age, we don't have the coaching resources to properly train the ones we do catch and this means that at the age of sixteen our budding footballers cannot compare with those in Spain, France and Italy etc.
I don't know enough about the relative set ups in place in these countries to make an accurate comparison but there were several things about Brooking's theory that invited comment.
The first was his continual, almost obsessive, use of Cesc Fabregas as his body of evidence for Spanish youth football being so much more advanced than ours.
Fabregas had been coached from the age of six at Barcelona before Arsenal basically stole him at the age of sixteen.
Nothing is proven by Cesc Fabregas, however.
He is an outstanding player, someone who genuinely lifts the standard of the Premier League.
But would he not have been an outstanding player even if he hadn't been at Barcelona at the age of six?
Sure, it no doubt helped his development and allowed him to realise his potential at an early age.
But surely Fabregas is a naturally gifted footballer. Brooking talks about first touch. Surely Fabregas wasn't taught how to trap a football. Surely Fabregas found trapping a football as easy to master as walking or talking, probably easier.
And Fabregas is the exception, not the rule. If every footballer coming out of the Barcelona academy was as good as him then we would have to admit that they were doing something remarkably right, and we were doing something wrong.
World class players, however, are generally born, not manufactured and you should be careful of jumping to conclusions based around the way these players emerge.
When Ajax of Amsterdam won the European Cup around a decade ago with a squad comprising of so many players that had come through their youth system everyone immediately decided that theirs' was the perfect system for developing young players.
Their methods were studied, documented and highlighted in the media endlessly and put before us as a foolproof method for rearing champions.
Of course Ajax have yet to challenge for another European Cup. Which is not to say their youth system is bad and lessons can't be learnt but is there any way of guaranteeing world class footballers? Or even Premier League class footballers?
While highlighting Fabregas Sir Trevor is careful not to make any mention of Wayne Rooney either. After all if we used him as an example surely we could just pretend that everything is fine with youth development in this country.
After all, he is a world class player. Isn't he?
The whole issue of coaching concerns me.
From coaching youngsters right through to coaching professionals. What good do coaches actually do?
Coaches make a difference to football, there can be no denying that. But is that difference for the better.
In the old days, which means the 1950's and earlier, coaching and tactics were kept to a bare minimum. Formations barely changed over half a century and teams just got on with the business of playing each other.
People laugh now at the scores that would regularly crop up each weekend as teams up and down the country tried to score more than the team they were playing against.
I don't know why. The only difference between football then and football now is that in those days teams went out to try and score against the opposition whereas now they go out and try to stop the other team from scoring against them.
It doesn't make them better footballers and it certainly doesn't make it any more entertaining for the spectators.
But coaches love to justify themselves therefore the old way had to be the wrong way. They don't seem to have worked out that in the end there can only ever be the same result. You either win, lose or draw and at the end of the season one team wins the league and one team finishes bottom. One team wins the cup and all the rest don't.
Once again the only difference is that nowadays the coaches and managers make sure that it is a lot less fun finding out who finishes where.
Another thing you will always hear coaches harping on about is how much faster the game is these days and how the great players of yesteryear wouldn't be able to cope in todays' game.
This really is the saddest, most annoying thing anyone can ever say.
It's nonsense for starters, because players from the 1950's brought up today would obviously be that much fitter/faster naturally, but should coaches not be more interested in skill?
Of course not because you can't coach someone to be a gifted footballer. You can only coach them to be fit, strong and organised.
Therefore coaches are intrinsically negative.
The funny thing is FIFA keep dreaming up ways to make it easier for you to score goals because that's what they want and every time they come up with something new all it does is make the coaches go twice as defensive because they're scared stiff it might be their team that concedes first.
It's great.
Another major gripe I have with coaches and coaching is that it is such a closed shop. It's almost masonic and that can't be a good thing.
Yesterday's coaches set up courses and qualifications which they have decided will manufacture a whole new breed of tip top coaches and everyone has to abide by their dictates.
What it seems to produce to me is a group of like minded, perhaps narrow minded, automatons who completely mistrust the artistic or the individual but love hard work, strength and fitness.
Brooking does not say that coaching is a bad thing. He simply says it is not done in the best way.
Look back through the annals ever since the time coaching became the fashion in football. Each following generation decides that the one before it did not coach in the right way and make up their own.
Then the generation after them decides that they too were wrong and set about it a different way. This is what Brooking is saying yet again.
One thing's for sure, the deeper we go into coaching techniques, practices and qualifications the further we get from any personality, flair or invention.
It's depressing to be honest.
At youth level, I'm talking grassroots level here, all coaches are interested in is getting the biggest boys on their side and beating the hell out of all the other smaller, weaker sides. Just like professional football really.
Again skill and individual flair is not exactly top of their agendas.
Of course you can substitute Manchester United for Barcelona and a club with their enormous resources should be in a position to identify and develop young talent to a significant degree.
So should a handful of other clubs in England.
The trouble is, and it's one that Brooking approaches without really identifying, is that money makes people lazy.
If a farmer who has worked the land for twenty years, supporting himself and others successfully, is suddenly offered so much money that he can simply pay for the best food other farmers produce without the hassle of putting in the time and effort himself then you can bet your bottom dollar that is what he will do.
Same with our top clubs. It is so much easier to let the rest of the world go to all the time, trouble and expense of "growing" the footballer and then just step in and buy him from them that you can hardly blame them for doing it.
After all, developing young talent is such a precarious task. No matter how big a world beater a boy looks at six, twelve, sixteen or even eighteen you can generally put your mortgage on the fact that he'll turn out to be a waste of space.
Consider the England schoolboys sides. You wouldn't think it was possible to play for England Schoolboys and not go on to make it as a professional at some level would you?
But just have a look back at the players who have represented us at that level and see how many names you recognise. Hardly any.
Now our top clubs, and plenty of the smaller ones, can simply wait for someone, somewhere else to produce a really good player and then go in and snap them up for themselves.
That's fine for the clubs but where does it leave our own youngsters?
The possibility of English Cesc Fabregas's being ignored now and in the future has to be so much the greater simply because our clubs are now in a position where they don't need to partake of the lottery that is producing your own talent.
There is another massive danger to the development of home grown talent and it is a point Brooking makes forcibly. That is a lack of patience with and opportunities for English youngsters.
It's okay bemoaning the possible fact that our footballers aren't as good as their foreign counterparts at the age of sixteen but how many players in the past have been late developers, or simply late being spotted?
The last time England made a significant impact at a World Cup was in 1990 when they reached the semi finals and were desperately unlucky not to go all the way.
Of that squad five players started in non league football (Waddle, Pearce, Barnes, Beardsley and Bull). Another four started their careers at teams in the lower reaches of the Football League (Parker, Wright, Webb and Steven).
Of those already mentioned Steve Bull was then cast aside by his first league club, West Brom, and had to establish himself from the depths of Division Four. Beardsley went from non league to Carlisle, was signed then discarded by Manchester United before re-emerging with Newcastle via a spell in Canada.
Two more of the squad (Platt and Seaman) started at big clubs only to be rejected and had to resurrect their careers at Crewe and Peterborough respectively.
Seaman got injured during those finals and had to return home. His replacement was Dave Beasant who was another who started in non league and had come up through the entire league structure with Wimbledon.
Humble beginnings for so many of that squad and yet it so nearly came home world beaters.
Even when you look at the other players who had come through the ranks of established bigger clubs they did not come from the really "big" clubs. Everton, a quality side leading up to those finals, had produced a couple but Manchester United (bar for the discarded Platt), Liverpool, Arsenal and Tottenham were responsible for none of them.
Nowadays, however, if you don't play for, or are at least on the staff of, one of the big four then your international chances are seriously diminished.
If you don't belong to a Premier League club or, maybe at worst, a Championship club then you can basically forget it. You are almost considered a failure before you've started.
Could an England squad these days ever hail from such diverse footballing backgrounds as the 1990 group?
I don't think so. Nowadays the squads are filled almost exclusively with players who have come through the ranks and been accepted by one of the established clubs or, at worst, been moved on from one of them to an acceptable alternative.
The nearest we have to the class of 1990 is David Nugent who was rejected by Liverpool as a youth and had to go to Bury and then Preston North End to make his mark. Now he has been snapped up by Portsmouth, probably in the main because of his solitary substitutes appearance for England, and has his chance to stake a claim for a regular squad place.
Before he got his England call up I was talking to some Liverpool supporters in a pub and expressed my opinion that Nugent was better then Dirk Kuyt. They looked at me as though I was bonkers.
That attitude is prevalent right through English football at the moment. Because Kuyt has played for Feyenoord, Liverpool and Holland then he must be better than a guy that's only played for Bury and Preston.
What chance have English players got when that is the prevailing attitude and, in the long run, what chance have England got?
If the situation had been the same in the 1880's then you can bet your life Newcastle would have signed two foreigners rather than Waddle and Beardsley and how bad would that have been for our game?
The other thing that nobody seems to consider is that it might actually not be a bad thing for a footballer to have developed his game in a predominantly non-football environment. Some of the players I have mentioned actually had to go out and work for a living before getting their lucky break and becoming professional footballers.
People like Alan Devonshire and Garry Birtles had to do the same and they were both fine, technically gifted players of the highest calibre who gave long and distinguished service to the English game.
It is highly likely that the precious attitude that comes with many of our top players these days emanates from the fact that they have experienced a closed, privileged environment for as long as they can remember.
It is not that the foreigners flooding our shores nowadays are necessarily any better than our own it is just so easy to bring them in en masse, keep the ones who are okay and ship out the others for a new batch at the end of every season.
No point taking a chance on the local forklift truck driver even if his name is Alan Devonshire or the champion sausage packer of the North East even if his name is Chrissy Waddle.
It annoys me.
Let's take a look at the Liverpool squad of last season. They are a big club and have spent plenty of money so their foreigners, who we can surely assume, are of a better quality than almost everyone elses.
Dudek, Padelli, Reina, Agger, Arbeloa, Aurelio, Kromkamp, Hyypia, Riise, Paletta, Alonso, Garcia, Gonzalez, Kewell, Mascherano, Sissoko, Zenden, Kuyt, Pongolle. There are others really not worth mentioning.
Are these players really of such outstanding quality that they deserve to get the preference over a dozen Brits? Two or three at most would surely be sufficient, ideally the ones that are good and actually want to play football.
The other point to consider is what will be the lasting benefit to Liverpool and English football of these players? Will they stay at the club long enough to establish themselves as genuine Liverpool stalwarts and will they still be in England, let alone Liverpool, when their careers are over passing on their skills and knowledge to future generations of English footballers?
Or will they disappear back abroad after a couple of years with their millions of pounds and never be seen or heard of again?
The other worry, for me at least, is the danger these players, and coaches, represent to the traditional English game.
It is natural to suppose that the more foreigners we have coaching and playing in this country the less the game will come to resemble the traditional English game.
Brooking might be right, the players playing it might have a better first touch but will they be providing as much excitement or entertainment.
Games of chess are boring, so, in the main, are Spanish football matches.
Funnily enough the thing that threatens English football, as I understand it, could be the thing that ends up saving it.
If English football stops being English football then perhaps Sky won't find it so attractive to show. They might start throwing their cash at other countries, so all the foreigners can bugger off there and earn their fortunes, while we get back to watching the fork lift truck drivers and sausage packers of the world strut their stuff.
from : http://www.football-england.com
