Coombs wrote:
Seems that countries with a combination of the culture, infrastructure, money, and opportunity consistently produce the most quality players. Unsurprisingly, these are all mostly colonial powers.
I think that's a bit shallow analysis personally. Brazil and Argentina aren't rich countries with well-oiled infrastructures, and they were colonized rather than colonists. Former colonial nations like Spain and Italy are two of the poorest and most economically stressed nations in Europe. Yet the overwhelming majority of all the footballing talent in the world stem from those four countries, with France and Germany to cap it off.
It's also easy to forget that both Germany and France recently had their own personal crisis where they struggled to produce a single world class player. It was that very fact that led to the German restructuring.
I think you need to factor in the unique national circumstances when you discuss talent development. A lot of factors tend to change depending on population size and which part of the world you belong to. The one common theme is that the more money you put into football through agencies and initiatives that don't expect to generate heavy profits off the investment (unlike football clubs, who are all in it for the hard money), the better the results are. Three examples of countries who have done so recently with similar methods and greatly exceeded expectations are Germany, Belgium and Iceland.
In terms of how to improve English football the opinions among those in charge diverge greatly. Several initiatives have been launched in the last few years but they've been criticised for making it more difficult for small clubs to get by. Consider this paragraph from an article about the German FA which was written by the time Bayern and Dortmund faced off in the Champions League final three years ago:
As for Saturday's Champions League final at Wembley, the DFB proudly points out that 26 of the players Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund named in their Uefa squads this season are homegrown and eligible to play for Germany. More than half of those players came through the DFB's talent development programme, which was introduced in 2003 with the aim of identifying promising youngsters and providing them with technical skills and tactical knowledge at an early age. Covering 366 areas of Germany, this impressive initiative caters for children aged 8 to 14 and is served by 1,000 part-time DFB coaches, all of whom must hold the Uefa B licence and are expected to scout as well as train the players. "We have 80 million people in Germany and I think before 2000 nobody noticed a lot of talent," Dutt says. "Now we notice everyone."
[...]
It is the opposite of what happens in England, where the FA relies on clubs to develop youngsters. Dutt smiles when it is suggested to him that the DFB are doing the clubs' recruitment for them. "But if we help the clubs, we help us, because the players of our national teams – the youth teams and Joachim Löw's team – come from the clubs," he says.
Mesut Özil was one of the youngsters the Germans found as a consequence of this development program.
There's a big contrast to England, where the FA introduced a new academy system in 2011 that shifted all of the responsibility for identifying and developing talents onto the clubs themselves. It's called the Elite Player Performance Plan, EPPP for short, and it introduces a big set of standards of facilities and personnel that clubs need to adhere to in order to run an academy. It also regulates minimum spendings on youth. Category One clubs, which are exempt from the 90-minute rule and other constraints, must in return spend at least £1.5 million on youth development each year while clubs in Category Four, which is the smallest, need to spend £100K.
I think it's still too early to evaluate the model fairly, but it has met heavy criticism from many lower-league clubs. Brentford were forced to shut down their academy last season for instance, citing EPPP as the big reason. Yeovil Town and a number of other clubs have also closed up shop in the last few years, and that's the exact opposite of what you want happening obviously. The German model is based on finding talent they previously missed. The English model seems to make it harder by offering the smaller clubs no help and very few incentives.
The 18 teams in Bundesliga willingly spend around £100 million per year on their academies by contrast. It's just easier to motivate that kind of investment when they know that it pays off, something he DFB have all but made sure thanks to their extensive work in identifying talent and providing well-educated coaches.
