The future of English football

Last week the chairman of the FA Greg Dyke made a really interesting and far reaching speech. It was bold ambitious and some may say daring. He has certainly put the cat among the pigeons if you like with many top clubs dismissing his ideas straight away. But I think there is a serious issue here with the state of English football and the current plight of the national team. Greg Dyke identified what is going wrong very ell the lack of trained coach's in this country and the huge cost of doing your coaching badges is a real block to people. In England we only have around 3000 trained coaches in comparison France, Germany and Spain are up around the 30 thousand mark which is a lot more and will as a result have a big impact in teaching our younger players about the game. I think in many ways our players in England are as good as any other in the world if they are given the freedom to play. I think sometimes they can be over coached at a young age and not able to fully express themselves learning the game by making mistakes and correcting them by themselves. Dykes speech was visionary he set some bold targets of a semi final in Euro 2020 and to actually win the world cup in 2022. These targets sound absolutely farfetched as we stand in England who still is finding it hard to qualify for next year’s world cup let alone one in 6 or 7 years time. There is hope a few good younger players are making it in the first team in England with prospects like Everton’s Ross Barklay and Tottenhams Andros Townsend getting a place in their club side and getting England call up's. Allot of Greg Dykes speech focused on the Premier league which we would e expect stating that too many average foreign players are brought in when an English based player is being denied an opportunity. I fully take on board the argument that if your good enough you will get in a big team but English players values are hugely over flated for example Swansea managed to sign a young Michu for £2m where as a similar player if he was English would have likely to set them back double that you'd have thought. A home grown player quota could be one answer not the false one we have now where the likes of Fabregas and Almunia were considered home grown as Arsenal had brought them over at a young age to their academy. But English based English born players. I think there should be a minimum amount of English players playing in your team every week. This could be tricky with employment laws I do accept but there needs to be some way either by a carrot or stick approach to encourage the big teams to help out the national team and give English players a chance. If they are never given the chance they cannot grow. All in all the English game is in a slow decline but this can change if radical thinking is taken up and acted on. Greg Dyke was signaling a warning shot to all of us football fans and all who have an interest in the game. For us who wish to see a strong England team c competing at the later stages of tournaments something has to be done and Greg Dyke should be praised for daring to suggest a commission to go about changing things. Whether it succeeds or not remains to be seen.