Blue genes

In David Bond’s excellent blog posting yesterday, he discussed Richard Scudamore’s recent (very limited amount of) acceptance of some blame for England’s appalling performance at the recent World Cup (which England has never won).

He comes up with some interesting figures.

Nearly 60 per cent of the Premier League players are not ‘home grown’. Of the 42 per cent that are ‘home grown’, not all of these are eligible to play for England.

The academy system in the country has some 300 players between the ages of 16 to 18, of which 245 are English.

The 2010/11 season will see Premier League teams having to comply with the new quota system that limits squads to 25 players, of which 17 have to be ‘home grown’. At the extreme (Arsenal, of course) that means there will be precisely two (yes, two – that’s 2 – one more than one, one less than three) English players. The other six ‘home grown’ players have come through the academy, but are not English – and never, presumably, will be. One suspects this will do wonders for Theo Walcott and Jack Wilshire’s foreign language skills. For their footballing skills, I fear the worst. Shame, two good players that probably could do well with another team.

But digging at Arsenal, while inherently warming inside for any football fan (only to be topped by digging at Liverpool, really), is misleading. The fact is that there are about as many teams in the Premier League and Championship that can claim more than 50 per cent British players (let alone English) as there are teeth in the average nine-month-old baby.

Again, this is not necessarily bad in and of itself (although I have pointed out in a previous blog that mediocrity among English players is often obscured by the brilliance of the foreign team mates), but what walked out of the computer screen and slapped me repeatedly across the face was a simple and immediately obvious discrepancy in the figures above…

Let’s have a look at them again…

58 per cent of players in the Premier League are from abroad. 42 per cent are ‘home grown’ (that is, not necessarily English). 245 out of 300 academy players between the ages of 16 and 18 are English – that’s 82 per cent…

There are 20 teams in the Premier League, each (now) with a squad of 25 players. That’s 500 players aged 21 upwards, which means that’s 210 home grown players.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but this means more than two out of three academy players are making it into the Premier League. Now that strikes me as a pretty good success rate. Using these figures, this means that we have something like 172 English players in the Premier League.

Seems to me that the problem is not so much the FA, or the manager, or the Premier League, or the clubs, or the foreign players, or even the academies. All of that seems to be in place. The problem is that England is turning out adequate squad players by the hundreds every two or three years. What they are not churning out is international standard players. It’s just that we’re a bit shit, really.

Is there anyway of nurturing raw talent? I’m thinking it will probably require genetic engineering, but with Britain up in arms today about someone having ‘slaughtered and eaten’ the offspring of a genetically modified cow, I doubt we’ll be going down that road any time soon.

The national team faces Hungary next Wednesday. Oh God! Come on Hungary…