What are the real reasons behind England’s international football failings?

There are too many non-English players in the Premier League.

This is the stock phrase when anticipating the outcome of the men’s English football team competing in international competition.
And it’s the go-to phrase when analysing their performance following an early exit from said competition.

But can it really be as simplistic as this?

Effective from 2010, Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore announced plans to implement a ‘home grown’ rule that would force eight of their 25-registered players to have been registered with an English or Welsh club for three years prior to their 21st birthday. The emphasis here is that these players don’t have to be English or Welsh. They just need to have been in the system.

The very purpose of this system was to ensure English youth talent was filtering through the academy projects and, ultimately, into the Premier League first teams where they would in turn strengthen the national team.

After six years, it would be fair to expect some results from this rule implementation — but have we had them?

Of the current under-21 squad, only James Ward-Prowse, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Jack Grealish and Nathan Redmond are the real ‘stand out’ names — although the team did win the recent Toulon Tournament, for a fifth time.

In reality, the ‘home grown talent’ rule is, well, pointless.

The recent success of the England under-21 team shouldn’t hide the fact that only four of the 21 players currently compete and are regulars in the top flight of English football. It also shouldn’t hide that, of the 25-man squad picked for the 2016 European Championships, 14 will be aged 28-or-over — with eight being over 30 — when the 2018 World Cup comes around.

The real problem isn’t that English players aren’t being selected ahead of their foreign counterparts.

The problem of failing to perform internationally comes from two issues.

Firstly, funding of youth coaching and development and, secondly, not enough English players playing abroad.

Stats from 2014 suggest that, for those players still involved in the game aged 16, only 25% will still be playing by the time they’re 21. Within five years, three out of four players will simply drop out of the sport (in a playing capacity, at least).

This summer, Stoke released six former-academy players. If each club in the Premier League followed the same pattern, that’s more than 100 young players disappearing from the top level of the game. In the meantime — using Stoke as the basis, again — 60 new players would progress from the academy into the professional game (Stoke signed three to professional terms, this summer). Given the 2014 statistics, it’s safe to assume that only 15 of these 60 will still be playing football in four years time — but lets not forget we don’t know what level this will be at.

If the best teams in the country aren’t capable of producing, on average, one player each per year who will still be playing after their 21st birthday, then it suggests the problem lies deeper than simply ‘too many foreigners’ being selected.

We must also remember that the Premier League is the ‘holy grail’ of a cash-cow — the richest league in the world that all other leagues look to for inspiration in their contractual negotiations (although China is fast catching up).

And whilst the money is being pumped into the top of the pyramid, it’s simply not finding its way down the league — to either the lower-level professional clubs, or the grassroots teams and coaches on a Sunday morning.

This money — from the commercial contracts for broadcasting, amongst others — is the sole reason so many players come to England, and why so many fans become disenfranchised once their team reaches the upper echelons.

It’s also why so many players don’t leave English football, except to retire.

Of the Euro 2016 Portuguese winning squad, only seven played their club football in Portugal. Only five players played in the French league and represented France in the final. Only two of the Welsh team ply their trade in Wales (albeit for Swansea, in the English Premier League) and of the Icelandic squad, none played in the Icelandic leagues.

Every single one of the England 25-man squad play in England.

The suggestion, of course, of forcing players to play overseas is ludicrous — but it does beg the question that, if so many only know the ‘English game’ and the English tactical approach, how can we ever compete internationally? Even Brazil, a team so many aspire to, had just seven players representing Brazilian clubs in their last game against Peru.

As already mentioned, one of the reasons so many English players wouldn’t consider moving abroad is due to lower wages overseas; the likes of Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munchen and PSG hold the financial clout on the continent.

Channelling more money, and overhauling extensively, the grassroots level of the game is paramount if we want to produce players who can compete on the world stage — but that’ll take years to come to fruition.

In the meantime, we’ll just have to accept that we will continue to struggle as a national team.