England
Success as a barrier to progress
Fervent popularity. A robust domestic league. A World Cup trophy. These are the three greatest achievements that a soccer federation can reach. And yet for the England Football Association (the FA), these factors have been the greatest hindrance to producing success.
While much debate surrounds who invented soccer, England are undoubtedly the ones who codified the modern version of the game, officially known as association football, in the mid-nineteenth century. And yet, even though they did win a World Cup in 1966, since the 1920’s they have never been the best, or, for the past fifty years, even close to the best team in the world. Rather, a mix of conservatism, stubbornness, and misguidedness has allowed several other countries to surpass England since the sport’s inception.
In his book Inverting the Pyramid, Jonathan Wilson details a long history in which Britain has rejected progress. For example, Wilson highlights the story of Jimmy Murphy, an English player whose methods were rejected in England, who nevertheless pioneered coaching strategies — from basic ideas such as regular practice with the ball to more complicated tactics — that came to define the German, Austrian, and Hungarian styles of play.
Instead of judging tactical and organizational philosophies on their merits, English teams and the FA merely attempted to mimic examples of success. While manager Herbert Chapman designed the W-M formation to fit the skillset of the players on his roster at Arsenal, all other English coaches adopted this strategy unwisely, without the necessary talent to make it work, simply because Arsenal won using it. Similarly, the 4-4-2 has dominated England’s tactical philosophy ever since Alf Ramsey first used it to lead the national team to a World Cup title on home soil in 1966. Although the 4-4-2 made sense given the players and opponents the English team had in 1966, advances made by other countries make it, for the most part, an outdated system.
While hardly blameworthy for the tactical decisions of English coaches, the FA has done plenty in its own right to inhibit the progress of England’s on-field strategy. For example, former FA director of coaching Charles Hughes heartily endorsed the philosophy that kicking the ball aimlessly down the field was a much more efficient strategy than passing. This ridiculous assertion was reinforced by the domestic achievements of a small club Watford, without any support to show that this direct style could succeed at the highest level, a notion supported by the English team, led by Hughes and former Watford coach Graham Taylor, failing even to qualify for the 1994 World Cup.
Poor tactical understanding and a misevaluation of what types of players could succeed on the international stage have crippled the FA’s ability to build a competitive team. Carlos Alberto, captain of the 1970 World Cup winning Brazil side, commented following England’s failure to qualify for the 2008 European Championships, “They never changed, they never improvised and they never improved. They put the high ball into the area and try to head it in, but they need to focus on more technical skills.” In the one instance in recent World Cups in which England strayed from their rigid formation, playing with an Italian style libero in the back as opposed to a flat back four, the team progressed to the semifinals, losing only on penalties in 1990, the team’s best showing at the World Cup since 1966.
While solitary examples of success have led to a dogmatic reverence for certain misguided principles, the collective success of the domestic English league has had detrimental effects on the national team as well. The influx of investment and revenues for the league has enabled and — by this point in time — forced clubs to buy the best foreign players in order to compete.
This has significantly diminished the opportunities domestic players have to play and develop. For example, the most common starting lineups for the top four teams in the Premiership in the 2012-13 season featured a total of only 10 English players, down from 19 among the top four in the 1999-00 season. Today, top English players including Wilfried Zaha, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, and Danny Welbeck struggled to get playing time at all because, despite their enormous talent, foreign imports were ranked ahead of them on the depth chart.
Whereas this season, the champion of the English Premier League, Manchester City, only started one Englishman, the goalkeeper Joe Hart, on a regular basis, other countries’ domestic leagues have a much greater emphasis on featuring native players. The German champion Bayern Munich started six German players more often than not this season, and still managed to defeat England’s best teams, including Manchester City, in the European Champions League.
Thus, the task facing the FA is to carefully manage the success that it does achieve in order to ensure that it does not stifle further growth. This year, for example, FA chairman Greg Dyke made several proposals to foster youth development, including the creation of a controversial ‘B league’ — a new entity that would be situated as a new division between the currently existing fourth and fifth divisions — in which elite teams like Manchester United and Chelsea would give playing time to young English players who have been squeezed out of the first team squad by foreign imports. Furthermore, Dyke proposed the establishment of strategic loan partnerships — a la the American minor league baseball system — between clubs in the top two divisions and the lower two divisions, a proposal that is complicated by the fact that three teams are promoted and relegated to and from each division every year.
Whether or not these initiatives come to fruition, the FA must prioritize the young English player. While much attention goes toward the lack of young English talent playing for the Premier League’s elite clubs, they are not the ones who have recently been responsible for developing the majority of England’s talent, with only five of the current 23 man squad having come from one of the ‘Big Six’ clubs’ academies.
Rather, the FA must ensure the financial viability of teams, like Everton and Southampton, who develop and give playing time to domestic talent. While in the past, big clubs have produced England’s best — David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Michael Owen, Tony Adams, Gary Neville, etc. — today those teams focus more on short term results and the accumulation of foreign players in their prime in order to compete against other big spenders like Real Madrid in the European Champions League. Thus, the focus of the FA must shift to creating an environment and financial structure in which smaller clubs who do in fact develop English players can thrive.
If England win this summer’s World Cup — an unlikelihood given that they have 25/1 odds to do so according to Sky Bet — the players, coach, and federation should celebrated and lauded for what is the greatest achievement in all of sport. However, getting out of its group and winning four games, while an extraordinary accomplishment, should not be the ultimate vindication or final verdict on the team’s new 4-2-3-1 formation, the merits of choosing youth over experience (as the current coach has done with his squad selection for the tournament), or the current model of player development. Rather, England must learn from it successes, not through imitation, but by building upon and advancing from them to become once again of the best soccer nations in the world.
