Survey Says English Players In Prem At Record Low
A BBC survey has revealed that the number of England-qualified players starting matches in the Barclays Premier League dropped to an all-time low in the season just concluded.
Research by BBC Sport has found that just 170 - 34.1 per cent - of the 498 players who started matches in the English top flight during the 2007-08 season were English.
The figure represents a substantial decline from the previous season, 2006-07, when 191 (38 per cent) of starters were English.
"The number is important because that's what I can choose from," conceded England manager Fabio Capello when asked about BBC Sport's findings yesterday. However, he stressed: "But more important is quality - the level of the player. At the moment the total is 34 per cent but the level [ie, the quality] is high. The work being done in the academies is very important. We probably have to change the system of training for young players.
"At Under-21, and younger national teams, we have a lot of good players. For the future, I hope next season is not 34 per cent but 40 per cent. It will be better for me and England football."
In last week's Champions League final, two English teams fielded 10 Englishmen among the 22 starters, but as European Championships are about to kick-off without England present, the diminishing pool of homegrown talent is a concern.
And in the week that Sepp Blatter, president of Fifa, is pushing his 'six-plus-five' quota proposal on a resistant club game, the figures appear to provide him with ammunition.
Blatter is convinced that restricting the number of foreign starters each club is allowed to just five will redress the balance. The problem, apart from the vehement opposition of clubs, is that his plan flies in the face of European Union employment law.
The English Premier League is opposed on principle, because if Blatter's quota plan becomes a rule within football, it would pose a masive challenge for English clubs: last season, fewer than one in five starting line-ups would have satisfied Blatter's requirements.
To put it another way, on average, only four players were qualified to represent England in each Premier League starting line-up last season.
Arsenal had the fewest English starters, averaging 0.34 per match, and West Ham United the most at 6.61.
In fact West Ham and Aston Villa (6.42) were the only two clubs in the Barclays Premier League to average more than six English starters last season. The 'Big Four' - Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool - averaged only 2.64 between them per game.
The situation was different in Scotland, where there were 6.27 Scotland-qualified players per starting line-up in the Scottish Premier League, meabing that while only 18 per cent of English line-ups met Blatter's quota, 56.8 per cent of Scotland's did.
Six of the 12 SPL teams (Aberdeen, Inverness Caledonian Thistle, Kilmarnock, St Mirren, Motherwell and Rangers) met the "six-plus-five" criterion in every match - not that it led to the Scots qualifying for Euro 2008 either.
However, the English figures also contrast sharply with those for Europe's other major leagues.
On the final weekend of the season, for example, there wre on average 7.3 Italians starting per Serie A team, 6.9 Spaniards per Primera Liga side, and 4.9 Germans per Bundesliga XI.
Although Italy, Spain and Germany all qualified for Euro 2008 and are among the favourites to win the tournament, the Premier League rightly rejected attempts to link the performance of the English national team with the number of foreign players top-flight English football. After all, England were under-performing on the international stage long before the number of foreign players in the domestic League became an issue.
England's only success remains winning the World Cup in 1966, and for all but the last dozen or so of the intervening 42 years, the English top-flight was overwhelmingly stocked by British-born players.
"Merely looking at numbers of England players in the Premier League is a blunt and misleading measure as to how well the national team should be doing," a Premier League statement argued.
"After all, in the 70s and 80s the vast majority of players in the top flight were eligible for England yet we routinely struggled to qualify for tournaments, let alone perform in them.
"Our figures show this season nearly 40% of the starting XIs were qualified to play for England, 10 of whom played in the Champions League Final, arguably the highest standard of football in the world.
"There is no shortage of players at the highest level to pick from but we all want to see more Englishmen capable of performing at this level.
"That is why Premier League clubs invest more than £40m a season in youth development, that is why the Premier League, along with the FA and the Football League, are driving through reforms to ensure the quality of coaching and player development is of the highest standard.
"We must raise standards, not implement something that will never happen under European law and would only create a broader pool of average players rather than a deeper one of the right level of talent for Premier League clubs and England."
goal.com
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All hail the Non-English Premier League
