As I write this, England’s national football team has been smoked by their arch-rivals Germany. The match should have been closer than 4-1 due to the missed goal by Frank Lampard, and it could be argued that if England didn’t have to pour everyone forward that the result would have been better, but there is no way a team that defended as poorly as England did is going to be a squad as class as Germany.
Already, less than an hour after the full time whistle, people are arguing about what went wrong. Obviously, the defence was poor. Some people blame the 4-4-2. Others blame Cappello. There’s some people screaming for Wayne Rooney to “step up”, with others saying he should be playing up, waiting for service instead of dawdling near the midfield. I even heard one person say that England’s backs aren’t skilled enough, which is nonsense when you’re talking about guys like John Terry.
I think the problem is much bigger than tactics, much bigger than who the manager is, even much bigger than who the players are. England’s problems begin at home, in England. They start with their professional leagues, and how they’ve let foreigners and a few big shots harm the English game.
BBC Radio’s Clive Waddle stated that the way Germany play is the same way you would see Werder Bremen, Schalke or any other German club side play during their league; one would have to assume that would be deliberate, patient, and with a premium on mistakes. Later, BBC’s Simon Austin tweeted that Germany’s league setup is set up to favour the international side. He’s right on that; they have a requirement on how many Germans have to be in the side, and their academy setup is much better in terms of developing home grown talent. Germany is able to develop talent, get them playing their way, and by the time the elite players step into the German side, they’re able to fit in and be a part of the larger picture.
England isn’t so fortunate. Their academy system is a joke; most bigger clubs don’t even take their own kids into the first team, and if they do, chances are good it’s a foreign player that they bought early. Most of the time, kids in top-flight academies only end up playing for lower leagues, and more and more smaller clubs are having to close their academies in order to cut costs and stay afloat. Furthermore, there’s no limit on international players; unlike Germany, where you’re limited five, in the Premier League, there are no limits, which allows the richer clubs to simply import the best players regardless of nationality. Add in the normal ingredients of England’s tabloid media and the fact that their wives and girlfriends (WAGs) get as much attention as the players sometimes, and you have a recipe for disaster for a national team that is essentially a collection of individuals. Let’s not forget that England had to change captains because their former captain (Terry) slept with the wife of one of his players (former England wing Wayne Bridge). That never happens in a real team. The Premier League has no restrictions on wages, no restrictions on transfer fees, no maximum club size (they can dump extras into their reserves), and no real limits on how they can run their club. Therefore, English players sometimes get left behind in favour of other European players, especially by the larger clubs.
To a layman’s eyes, this is as easy as fixing the system. “Oh, well they can have a cap on players, force X amount of English players to a side, institute a salary cap… these things work just fine for American sports, why not the EPL! The federation in charge (The Football Authority) has that power, right?”
Not so fast. To make sweeping change, you’re going to need the clubs involved, and the sad fact is that English football is run by about six clubs. One look at the ownership of these clubs tells you all you need to know about how much they care about English football:
Manchester United: American owners, who have gone seriously into debt for the team, which has upset American fans because it directly affects the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Chelsea: Russian owner who literally bought the team to prominence, and drove up transfer rates across Europe.
Liverpool: American owners, who are even worse than Manchester’s Glazer family: Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr. got into football with not much knowledge of what they were doing, and now, Tom Hicks is having to sell his other teams, most notably the Texas Rangers, because he’s driven Liverpool so hard into debt.
Arsenal: Multinational conglomerate, with the main ownership stake owned by an American.
Manchester City: Probably the worst owners in the game, in terms of the damage they’re doing to football worldwide. The team is owned by a couple of Saudi sheikhs, who came in and immediately started spending hundreds of millions of pounds. A midcard team was instantly turned into a European contender.
Tottenham Hotspur: A conglomerate primarily owned by an Englishman. The only team in the top six that is English owned.
In addition to those teams, Aston Villa (United States), Birmingham (Hong Kong), Fulham (Egypt) and Sunderland (United States) are all foreign owned. That’s nine teams out of twenty in the Premier League, and doesn’t even count West Ham (40% Norwegian, 30% English, 30% Welsh). Every team that either came up from the Championship or went down for the 2010/2011 season were English owned; of those, Portsmouth is in administration, Hull City is looking for outside investment, and Newcastle’s desperately looking to sell despite the owner being a massive fan of the club. Even the Championship has an increasing level of investment from outside the UK: Cardiff City (Malaysia), Derby County (United States), Leicester City (Serbia), Queens Park Rangers (50% India, 25% Italy, 25% English) and Watford (63% Italian, 37% English) are predominantly owned by people outside the UK, with two teams (Portsmouth and Crystal Palace) being in administration.
The point is that the owners of football’s biggest clubs – the clubs that, realistically speaking, have the FA by the short hairs – are heavily foreign, especially the big money clubs at the top of the list. Changing the rules hurts those bigger clubs because they won’t be able to simply outspend their opposition, which keeps them in the top of the table, which keeps them playing in Europe, keeps them getting the lion’s share of the money via sponsorships, TV deals, etc. It would be against their best interests to change the rules; they don’t care that smaller clubs are floundering, and in these cases, they don’t care one iota about the English club. Even some of the English owners don’t care. Owen Oyston (Blackpool’s 80% owner) is a convicted rapist; he doesn’t even care enough to keep his dick in his pants. Do you think he gives a rat’s arse about the English National Team?
Getting these teams on board is going to be nearly impossible. They can’t cap wages because that will put them at a disadvantage against other European clubs in the Champion’s League. They can’t cap foreigners because larger clubs will complain. And if they try to force these changes, we will see the long-rumoured European Superleague come to fruition so fast our heads will spin. The FA can’t afford to anger the big clubs because without the Manchesters and Liverpools, the money well will dry up, the Premier League will become a B-list league like the Scottish Premier League and Greece’s Super League, teams like Celtic and Rangers will stop trying to get in, and it will devastate a setup that has been set up on staying in the Premier League for the massive TV contract money.
The teams that have disappointed the most in the World Cup were all European: England, France, Italy. Spain almost crashed and burned, and could very well exit when they play against a dangerous Portugal side. These countries all have one thing in common: their leagues, at the top levels, are no longer domestic affairs, as the lure of big money investment from the rest of Europe and beyond have compromised them. Due to said money, they will never reform, lest they all lose their biggest clubs to a newly formed Superleague run by non-European owners looking to cash in. Therefore, because of a system that treats their national teams as both a birthright for success and an afterthought – never a good combination – these sides will always be, at best, inconsistent, and at worst, B-list. They will continue to draw against Algeria, lose to South Africa, lose to Slovakia, draw against New Zealand, and sometimes not even qualify for major tournaments such as the European Championships. The media will scream and call for an inquiry, fans will be disappointed, players will be shamed, managers will be changed, and nothing will ultimately change except the calender.
Meanwhile, expect to see sides like Germany – who’s World Cup team doesn’t have one single player playing outside of Germany – excel, as usual.
After his win in the Kentucky Republican Senate Primary – effectively giving him the Senate seat in deep red Kentucky – Rand Paul, the son of Texas Rep. and libertarian icon Ron Paul, ended up in a bit of political hot water. His comments that 
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I have a dirty secret to announce to my readers: I was once a Yankee fan.