goon wrote:
They may have lacked culture but they had genuinely world class footballers which is something the current crop don't have a lot of. A back four that included Rio, Terry and Cole, a midfield that included Lampard, Gerrard, Carrick and Hargreaves as well as a prime Rooney up top. The only think it was really lacking was good wide players and a 'modern' formation.
There's a book about this called "Who Killed English Football?" that is a pretty good account of where Premier League went wrong initially. Talent production was working fine for Sol Campbell's generation but the ones that came after that suffered for a couple of reasons, most of which have since been rectified. The league started to generate massive money very quickly which made it possible to go for big foreign players that would otherwise have ended up in Serie A or Spain. You had the Bosman ruling and the age of agents beginning, both of which hit England in a big way.
At the same time you had these crippling restrictions for English youth players: they couldn't move to a club outside the 90 minute commute rule, couldn't sign contracts before they came of age, and so forth. There weren't networks of qualified youth coaches to find and guide them on community level (this is the main thing that has been credited for Germany's rise in talent production during the 2010s). In Spain and Italy the best talents go to the best academies to develop from an early age. (Cesc for instance was not a Barca youth initially; they took him from some country team when he was 11 or 12, just a few years before we lured him to London). That never used to be the case in England. It was a hundred times more worthwhile for Arsenal back in he early 00s to fill our academy with Swedish, French, Dutch and Spanish kids rather than combing through a part of London for local talent.
If you look at our academy today by contrast nearly all of them are English. It feels like it has become quite rare for us to steal youth players from abroad, and this has also coincided with the best talent crop I've seen for as long as I've supported the club. There's definitely a correlation there.
