Every four years, the World Cup presents an opportunity to see what English football would be like with only English players. The difference is more striking with each tournament. Our club game may well have become a global industry — but it is hard to see how the money has helped the national team. Our club sides are filled with global talent — but a young native player has never found it more difficult to reach the top.
Since the Premiership’s inception in 1992, the number of English under-25s in the league has fallen by two thirds. Certainly, English players benefit from playing alongside the likes of Didier Drogba and Fernando Torres. And it says much for England’s open-mindedness that we have Premiership matches without a single English player in the starting line-up — and the fans care only about the football. But this is small consolation to footballers who have been overlooked in favour of 17-year-old Latvians signed by global talent scouts.
In this way, the English Premiership has become a non-stop World Cup for every-one. As Mihir Bose has written in these pages recently, most Premiership players are now foreign-born, whereas the league started with each team having on average just one player born overseas. Add foreign owners and managers, and English football is scarcely English at all.
Optimists have argued that this internationalism has given England its best team — and the best chance of winning — since Bobby Robson’s side reached the semi-finals in 1990. England’s players, now replete with £1.1 million average salaries, have been playing in their own little world league every single Saturday. But the inauspicious draw with the United States has tested this theory. It remains to be seen if English football has taken over the world — or whether it is the other way around.
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