The article hints that England's youth training did not encourage creativity, which makes sense. English players are known to be less skillful than their Latin American counter parts who grew up playing in the street.
It also mentioned that they have revamped their training scheme to systemically encourage creativity, following Germany's experiments. And English youth teams have been winning in the past few years.
How many players on this year's English team play in foreign leagues? compare to other competitive national teams. In recent years the only other European national team with players who don't (can't?) play outside their own country is Russia.
Hypothesis: having some of a country's top players participating in leagues with different styles of play is helpful -- so as not to be stuck in and limited by an ever-repeating style and system of offense/defense.
English Premier League is the best league in the world, so why would any English player want to play elsewhere?
Regarding different playing styles: Premier League has a lot of players and managers from all around the world, so there is no shortage of different playing styles.
I think the real reasons why England has such limited success in football are these:
- having best (and richest) leaque is a mixed blessing: brings a lot of foreign players, taking spots away from native English ones.
- another reason, related to previous: English teams have a lot of money, so they prefer buying players and not training them themselves. Compare that with Spanish teams (Real, Barcelona) which have those big training sites for junior players, and usually half of the senior team line-ups is made of it's alumni. That's why Spain has plenty of world-class players, and England doesn't.
The taking spots away argument doesn’t make any sense. There are 20 clubs in the EPL. That’s 220 starting players. Even if 10% are English, your starting lineups give you enough English players to field an entire team. And those players get to play with the best in the world. Of all the teams, the English players would have the most collective experience playing against the best. More importantly (because players don’t learn how to play during matches, but rather, during training) they would have trained with the best in the world.
The core players of the last two World Cup-winning teams played in their home leagues. It helps a lot more to invent a style that confers an advantage. Foreign exposure in top leagues is useful to smaller (in footballing terms) countries making deep runs. Those countries never win the whole thing, though.
Do you believe that there is no difference between having a national team with zero players who thrive in foreign leagues vs having 4-5 key players who do?
In 2007 Liverpool reached the UEFA Champions League Final, and lost to Milan. In 2008 they reached the semi-final, and lost to Chelsea, whose opponents in the final were Man U, making it the first all-English final in the competition's history. How is that "not very internationally competitive"?
England is clearly apart from all other teams in its insularity; even Russia manages to include two players with foreign-league experience in their selection.
Since you were kind enough to remove the grump from your comment:
Do you believe that there is no difference between having a national team with zero players who thrive in foreign leagues vs having 4-5 key players who do?
I don't believe that, it's not really what I'm saying. On the other hand, this is the winning squad of the 2006 World Cup.
It's tricolore all the way. I don't think foreign league participation is what keeps English fans from having to endlessly update the years of hurt count.
A somewhat overlooked factor: Luck. International tournaments are won by single elimination games - in the case of the World Cup, four. Four wins in a row in a relatively low-scoring sport against the best the rest of the world has to offer. You have to be good but you also have to be a bit lucky. Unfortunately for England, they've rarely been particularly good and they've often been particularly unlucky.
Another common factor among many World Cup winners is a top flight national club league that produces the core of the national team and drives significant tactical or other innovation. That would give you (in their respective heydays) Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Germany, Spain. The Netherlands is missing - bad luck.
The Premiere league is commercially successful but isn't quite that sort of league. English clubs are regularly embarrassed by their top European competitors. There's not much incentive to fix this, though, since the league prints money as it is.
The reason why English clubs are not successfull internationally is proably because their own league is so demanding, that they simply save their strength for national competition, ignoring Champions League altogether.
And this even makes financial sense, because winning Premier League pays much bigger money than winning Champions League.
I've often wondered if having so many strong club level teams is a disadvantage for the national team. Diverting resources and bringing in foreign talent may not help.
Having said that I really no nothing about football :)
Edit: Frankly I don't care so much about karma, but this downvote is strange. I would have thought that this reason wasn't controversial at all. I've even heard british players say that. Anybody care to explain?
It also mentioned that they have revamped their training scheme to systemically encourage creativity, following Germany's experiments. And English youth teams have been winning in the past few years.