You Don't Know What You're Doing

Earlier this week, Sir Trevor Brooking – the new head of the FA’s Youth Development Programme – spoke to the BBC about his concerns for the future of English football. According to cockney Trev, the influx of foreigners into the Premier League is preventing English kids from breaking through into first teams, and creating an ever-smaller pool of players for Steve McClaren to choose from. He points out that in 1992, at the start of the Premier League, the percentage of English players in our top-flight was around 60%. Now it’s around 30%, and dropping. Brooking is in a position where he can assess very clearly the state of youth development at the moment, and he’s backed up his argument with figures to demonstrate his point. Looking at it that way, it’s easy to suggest he makes a fair argument. Easy, but wrong. I’m about to show you that Brooking is talking b*****ks, in the hope that as many of you as possible will cease to listen to a single word that comes out of this tw*t’s mouth.

There are so many flaws with Brooking’s argument that I hardly know where to start. But first of all we’ll not actually argue with anything he’s said. Lets just assume for a minute – wrongly – that everything Brooking has said makes sense, and is correct. Lets pretend we’ve got too many foreigners, and this means lots of young English kids can’t get a game. That scenario would in no way stop ALL young English kids getting a game, just most of them. In other words, only the very best young English players WILL get a game, and they’ll be playing – on a Saturday as well as every day in training – against the very same players they’d have to face at International level. It is surely of benefit to someone like Michael Johnson at Man City, for example, to train alongside Dietmar Hamann or Elano, and I’d much rather he was playing against Tomas Rosicky than against Michael Thomas.

Back in the day, on a Saturday afternoon the likes of Johnson learned nothing about the way foreign players played their football, but they knew all about how third-rate Englishmen played. That’s great when you’re playing away to Torquay in the FA Cup, but leaves you a bit short going away to Italy. So argument one with Brooking’s theory is actually twofold – even if there ARE “too many” foreigners over here, the cream of English players will always rise to the top (Gerrard, Carragher, Cole, Terry, Richards, Agbonlahor, Derbyshire…) and when they do, they will undoubtedly learn from these foreign players, leaving them better acquainted with the variety of footballing styles that exist in the world.

Argument two is where I start to take issue with his figures. Brooking argues that back in 1992, 60% of Premier League players were English, and this is obviously a figure that is of benefit to the national team. 1992? Wait there a second, Trev – what happened in 1992 again? Wasn’t that the European Championships where we didn’t qualify from our group, and only scored one goal? Yes. Yes it was. And what happened in 93-94 Trev? Didn’t we totally fail to qualify for USA 94? Now maybe, just maybe, that had something to do with the likes of Tony Dorigo, Carlton Palmer and Tony Daley getting a f**king game for England just because they got regular games for some of the top sides in the country.

We were absolutely s**t in the early 90’s, and this is the era that Brooking wants us to model ourselves upon. How handy for him then, that in McClaren, we have the worst English manager since Graham Taylor. We’re halfway to 92 standard already. Now all we need to do is get rid of the likes of Berbatov, Torres and Ronaldo so that Neil Mellor and Chris Eagles get their chance to play for England. Jesus Christ.

My third argument is based on quality. Much has been made of the fact that English players cost far too much money compared to their foreign counterparts, with £6m Kenwyne Jones costing nearly twice as much as Benni McCarthy. This, it is argued, leads English managers to shop abroad. I agree with that to an extent, but it’s nowhere near the whole story. By and large, when a Premiership manager buys a foreign player, it’s because he’s the best man for the job, plain and simple. Look at Manchester United. This is a club where the odd 4-5 million pounds is neither here nor there, whether they pay £8m or £12m for a player is, in the long run, all the same to them. So when they picked up Cristiano Ronaldo for £9m or so, it wasn’t because Stewart Downing would have cost a bank-breaking £12m from nasty greedy Middlesbrough. It was actually because Ronaldo is the dog’s b*****ks, and Downing is fairly ordinary by world standards.

So the foreign players coming into the game are doing so because they’re some of the best available, not purely because of cost. Taking the Ronaldo example, every English full back in the country – Luke Young, Nicky Shorey, Liam Rosenior, Stephen Warnock, every lad we’d only really rely on in an injury crisis – has played against probably the best winger in the world, on a regular basis. In argument one I commented that playing against foreign players helps young English lads learn about different styles – here my point is those players also tend to be class. When I mentioned before I’d rather see Michael Johnson playing against Rosicky than Michael Thomas, I meant he’d be learning about the way a foreign player likes to play the game in a different way, but it’s all the more true that he’d be playing against a class act. This would help him develop even more than learning about different styles. Some foreign players bring a different flavour to the Premier League, others bring a different class. And both are vital in preparing our young players for the rigours of International football.

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The vast majority of foreigners in the Premier League genuinely improve the quality. Take Portsmouth – John Utaka (who no-one had heard of) looks a far better buy than David “England Cap” Nugent. If Dorigo, Daley and Palmer were playing now they’d be nowhere near the England squad, or their club’s first teams. They’d be shown up as the s**t they were every Saturday afternoon, and not just when they put an England shirt on. We were genuinely surprised in the 90's, to find out these players couldn't cut it - but the likes of Ronaldo are now providing us with a weekly yardstick to measure our kids against.

In England today, we have the biggest crop of genuinely top-class players we’ve had for generations. Gerrard, Rooney, Terry, Ashley Cole, Joe Cole, Little Mickey Owen, hell – even the likes of Crouch and Wright-Phillips when you think about it – these lads would get into most teams around the world. (Think what AC Milan could do with a target man like Crouchy, or the pace and width of a Cole or SWP. Being Italian, they’d also appreciate Terry, Lescott, and Taylor too.) We also have a superb crop of promising youngsters – Walcott, Agbonlahor, Young, Davies, Carson, Derbyshire, Bentley – and yet we’re undoubtedly underachieving. That’s pretty worrying.

But what’s more worrying is that the head of youth development, at the organisation that runs our national team, actually thinks that our underachievement is down to a lack of quality in our players, rather than looking at the make-up of the team, their style of play, or tactical know-how. In other words, he’s not looking at the Manager. Instead, he’s propagating the exact same “We don’t need Johnny Foreigner” attitude that lead to us appointing a sub-standard manager in the first place, simply because he was English. In other words, the FA still haven’t learned their lesson.

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Oh – and thrown in to boot, the head of youth development says the kids aren’t good enough and it’s the clubs' fault – not his. Trevor, YOU’RE the one who should be making sure they ARE good enough, not blaming others when they’re not performing. How the f**k has this xenophobic arse-hole got his job when he’s clearly so clueless? The only answer I can give is that those above him at the FA must be even more so.