England's got talent

We tend to cover our ears nowadays when we hear Sepp Blatter has come up with another ‘big idea’ for the future of our game.

The man whose past brainwaves have included bigger goals, female players in tight shorts and the silver goal has been on his soap box again and the immediate temptation is to turn a blind eye.

For years the games hierarchy has treated the FIFA president with the kind of dismissive contempt reserved for an embarrassing relative, smiling politely as he prattles on then chuckling to each other behind his back.

However, his latest ‘six plus five’ suggestion for a limit on the number of foreign teams has actually made it to the debating table and has even been backed by the rest of FIFA.

For once Blatter has addressed an area of major concern in football that is being discussed on the terraces and in the pubs.

The standard line tracked out by journalists and fans alike is that the lack of English talent at the top of our game is effecting the national team.

This xenophobic argument for me lacks logic, the standard of football in the Premiership has shot up since the ‘invasion’ of foreigners in the 1990s and young English players are constantly getting the chance to test themselves against the best in the business.

This season’s all-Premiership Champions League final boasted no more than ten English players (although one of them, Paul Scholes, has retired from the international game).

My point is that if the foreigners were taken out of these squads and the Premiership generally the league would not have been so demanding that it produced teams to compete at Europe’s top table.

The standard bar has been raised to such a level that at least one English team has contested each of the last four finals, whereas Manchester United’s 1999 triumph was the only appearance in 15 years following English clubs’ return from European exile.

The league is strong and therefore the clubs are strong, what is essential is that we keep the supply of English talent coming through to the top teams.

That is why I agree with David Bentley when he spoke out (so unlike him!) about a lower key foreign influx, the one happening at academy level.

Managers like Rafael Benitez have scouts scouring the world looking for the next Cesc Fabregas, a £20 million player who Arsenal picked up for nothing by pinching him from under the noses of Barcelona as he was too young to sign a deal with the Catalan giants.

But for every Fabregas, how many valuable places are taken up in Premiership club’s youth squads by the a kid who is apparently next foreign teen sensation, who takes the place at the expense of a local youngster and then fails to make the first team grade.

Manchester City struck a positive blow for the future of English football last season when their side of largely local lads beat a Chelsea side littered with foreign talent in the FA Youth Cup final.
The key is we need English youngsters to be trained by the best coaches at the best academies.
Arsene Wenger may be constantly castigated by his lack of faith in young English talent but the Arsenal youth set up produced the likes of Bentley, Ashley Cole, Steve Sidwell, Justin Hoyte and James Harper.

What we need to ensure is the likes of Fran Merida, dubbed the new Fabregas, do not fill the Arsenal youth ranks and that all Premiership clubs spend less time looking in Mexico, Spain or Ghana for the next first team star and more time scouring for talent to develop on their doorstep.