England’s young lions prepare for glory

Hark, England are on a winning streak! The Three Lions unbeaten in nine games! Straight wins for the last four!

Have I taken a knock to my head? It may well appear so. Yet I write not of the misbegotten senior team, but of the under 19’s, who last night despatched the Czech Republic 2 – 1 at Leyton Orient.

This is largely the same group of players who in 2010 became European Champions as under 17s, just as the big boys were busy capitulating in South Africa.

Talk to the great and good of English football about the hallmark of good teams in the modern game and one is treated to a litany of sporting cliches. Know what your options are. Play to feet. Play the ball out from the back. Use all three thirds of the pitch. And never ever just hoof it.

Last night was no bad exposition of this brave new world.

So ignore results for a moment – ignore indeed the under 19’s apparently stellar form – because the odd win here and there may flatter to deceive. For did the England seniors not just beat Spain, the World Champions, 1 – 0?

But to consider the structure of the national game is to lay bare the sick man of European football.

While the Premier League is oft hailed as the most exciting in the world – attracting the best players, on the biggest salaries, with some of the biggest attendances – there has been a drop in the number of English players selected for first team football.

In Spain, 75 per cent of first team players are Spanish. That means top level exposure and development from a young age, week in, week out. In the Premier League, around 35 per cent of first team players are English. It is simply harder to gain crucial match experience as a home grown player here, than overseas.

And there’s a direct impact on the national team. The quality through the youth sides is so high in Spain that players are very rarely selected to move up and represent one of the older age groups. There are always too many good players with a year, or two years’ more experience.

They have more technically and strategically skilled players – and they have better coaches too.

Less than 3,000 English coaches hold Uefa’s top badges – B, A and Pro. Spain has nearly 24,000, Italy nearly 30,000, while Germany have around 35,000. The ratio of players to Uefa pro coaches in England is around 1 to twenty thousand. In Spain, it’s around 1 to two hundred.

Now the English do retest coaches at regular intervals, whereas the Spanish badge is harder to lose, so granted we’re not comparing apples with apples, but you catch my drift.

And the oft-repeated outcome is that for a generation our continental friends have been learning skills and strategy, while we’ve just been lamping it upfield to the big kid.

Club versus country

And the differences don’t end there. Here there is an unhealthy tension between club and country. Clubs are understandably reluctant to hand their players over to another team – even if it is England – for fear of injury or exhaustion.

In Spain the clubs have to co-operate with the national association throughout the year groups. They call this mandatory release. If the national team wants a player – it gets him.

It’s no secret the Premier League juggernaut calls the shots when it comes to football administration in England. It has the money, the players, and the exposure.

So what, exactly, can english football do to start to deliver success at the national level? What can the FA do to change the very structure of the game?

The phrase `when St George’s Park opens’ must have passed the lips of Sir Trevor Brooking a dozen times last night. The FA’s director of football development, and man in joint charge of the search for a new england manager, was briefing journalists ahead of the U19’s outing against the Czechs.

The FA’s new centre of excellence finally goes into operation this summer. It will house all 24 of England’s football teams. In theory this means England managers through the age groups can develop players and teams in a way they have never been able to before. It’ll also provide a hub for coaching the coaches, so they in turn can up the quality of football coaching across the board.

According to Brooking, the future of English football depends on this new sports complex just outside Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire.

The FA’s vision for the future

The FA’s footballing philosophy is outlined in a book called The Future Game, which was launched at the time of the 2010 World Cup. Delivery of this philosophy is underpinned by the England’s national football centre, which is scheduled to open its doors in summer 2012.

St George’s Park at Burton-upon-Trent will be the focus for the FA’s drive to permeate the philosophy throughout all levels of the game. St George’s Park will also support the development of coaches and players as well as providing rehabilitation and fitness facilities.

Its role in coaching is particularly important because England lags behind major footballing nations like Germany and Spain in terms of the number of coaches with UEFA Pro licences.

However, the FA insists that the quality of candidates is as important as the number. â??The FA only runs one UEFA Pro Licence course every year with a maximum of 20 candidates to emphasise quality over quantity on the coaching pathway.â? The FA does not intend for every boy or girl with a talent for football to pass through the centre.

Instead, it wants to disseminate its vision for the future game through working with coaches at the grassroots. St George’s Park is therefore not an finishing school for players, but an open university for everyone involved in the development of footballers at all levels.

Now Brooking has every reason of course to hail it’s significance – and while yes, he admits it’s been hard going, in for example the success of the U19 team, we are beginning to see structural improvements.

But curb your enthusiasm for just a moment. The under 19s might be able to pass a ball around against mediocre opposition in front of a couple thousand people during a midweek friendly. But how will the next crop of youngsters fare when they are playing for the senior team against the best in the world – assuming they do qualify for major tournaments like the Euros or the World Cup?

The seeds the FA has planted at St George’s Park won’t start to really bear fruit for another 5 or even 10 years.

So let us not speculate on how the first team will fare against the Netherlands tonight. For surely it is but a fool’s errand to bet against the second best team in the world.

Neither should we speculate on how far England will progress in the European Championships this summer, for to qualify out of the group stages they have to overhaul France, Sweden, and one of the hosts, Ukraine.

Let us not even speculate about the next world cup in Brazil, for that is after all only 2 years away.

For it will not be until the 2018 world cup in Russia, or even the 2022 world cup in Qatar, that – all being well – the changes being introduced now will render England’s leaden-footed approach to managing the national game a thing of history. Just like ’66.

And whatever the FA’s good intentions, they are more reliant now for developing new talent on the clubs and the Premier League than they’ve ever been. It is the clubs who run academies, and scout, and manage the stars of tomorrow.

Noel Blake, the U19s manager, and architect of that U17’s euro title two years ago told me things are changing. England’s youth teams are better than they used to be, “but without the clubs backing the changes too”, he said “we may as well still be 50 years away”.

How reassuring…