Danny Mills was quoted in yesterday’s standard, where he backed the FA commission’s calls for Premier B teams. From his comments, it is clear the commission understood the issues around grass roots coaching, but it is all the more amazing that rather than take steps to address this – they jump to the B team solution as a means of 17 -18 year olds getting competitive football. It is almost surreal – this is the problem – here is a solution to something else that may have a limited contribution and if you don’t back it suggest something better or shut up. Of course we don’t really want you to suggest something better – we are not interested and it would probably upset the big clubs, so we say that for effect!
Well I will suggest something better - sorry:
Firstly address the grass roots issues – that means deciding what you want and making sure existing coaches can supply it – possibly through education. It also means bringing in more new trained coaches and getting rid of those who put winning before development – probably most of them. You need a Czar to co-ordinate this – so you need to appoint somebody like Glenn Hoddle and allow him to ruffle feathers. You also have to finance this as more accessable and better coaching for coaches will cost. Ok – with Hoddle in charge of that – we would start to move in the right direction, so the administrators can look at the system whilst he sorts that out.
This is where the FA are particularly stupid. They look at Spain – the most successful country in recent years and decide to copy things they do. Then they ignore the important things they have done/do and focus on something they have done for ever, even when they were worse than us – which should be a bit of a clue – that is having B teams competing in the lower leagues. Surely the person with at least half a brain looks to things they have done differently prior to the improvement!
One thing they have done differently would be down to Glenn to address. That is the British fixation with young boys playing to win at the expense of playing to express themselves and learn. Even the big academies go for the big lads above others too often – where as the Spanish academies look for ‘the lads that look up’. Now I see a lot of boy’s football, and I can see these lads, but not one coach I have spoken to can. They are often not the most effective players in the team as for their vision to work they need their team mates to be on a similar wave length and their potential to be encouraged and nutured – but this quality is the seed of a top class player. Of course most wouldn’t develop into one – but if we plant those seeds, we have more chance of finding one or two or even three!
But leaving Glenn to sort out the proportional pitches and non-competitive games etc… Why don’t the football top brass look at ways we could make our system work. There is a view that we have too many professional team sand this is a negative – but why can’t we make it a positive? Making a positive is all about finding a way to create conditions that produce more talent. Producing world class players is very much down to the law of averages – the more players who are developed with the potential to be world class, the more world class ones will spring out form that.
So you decide how you are going to play as a nation – also a job for Glenn – then you get the lower league professional teams to sign up to this. But you need to give them an incentive to do what you want. That can only be financial and based on results. So if Crewe Alexandra procuce a Messi – they need to know it will have massive positive financial implications for them. Firstly, you scrap the current system that allows clubs to poach players for peanuts and you have a tribunal that everybody knows comes up with a fair compensation package- including a generous sell on. But you also have an English International scheme where any England international who gets 10 caps provides £1m for the club that produced him. Then they get another £1m for every subsequent 10 caps. SO what you have produced is an incentive for the many clubs we have to have better academies and focus on producing the sort of players we need. This becomes an advantage this country has, because of its traditional structure that others can’t emulate.
Then you look at the better solution to B teams. The big Premiership teams want to win trophies. These are no longer just domestic ones. To achieve this, they want to acquire the best players they can. Usually, these are foreign. Now if we made them play a minimum of 5 home players, they would be weakened. If they wanted to achieve their wider aims – which they will - they now have an incentive to improve the quality of home players. An incentive that for or the rhetoric, they currently don’t have. There could be some reasonable flexibility in this – so the big clubs could be told that this stipulation will happen in 5 years – which will give them time to prepare, and still be competitive as they do so.
So that is what I think would see England doing similar things to Germany in 8 to 10 years time. Much more likely to succeed than the FA’s token plan. So there you go messers Dyke and Mills – a better plan you can ignore!
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Comments
I've always found that England's biggest issue is the fact that after every World Cup the top people come out and say... "Right we need to be playing like " and they think that if for the next four years we play to that system, get to the World Cup and then flop only for the cycle to begin all over.. At the end of the day its just confusing and there's no consistency.
Just look at Spain like Muttley says... For the last six years they've used the tika taka style something that clubs have only just started using over here because it was clearly working yet now look at Spain and you could almost say that the tika taka style has had its day and the German style is about to come into effect.
At the end of the day we need to ignore what the Senior International Squads are doing instead we need to look at how the kids (10-12 years old if need be) are being taught and go from there.
Look at Belgium for example 2002 was their last tournament... they wrote themselves off for 12 years and in the process have become the dark horses of the latest World Cup and could some day be the World Champions, this is something we need to do in England but I cant ever see it because people are too impatient
I couldn't agree more with your long term thinking, particularly the financial recognition of clubs developing talent.
However, I still think part of the reason other international sides seem to be able to produce top class players is that they're all playing here. Whilst I'd welcome a quota of English players, Ashley Cole's move to Roma reminded me that we have so few players going abroad to develop their game in other top flights. And why would they when they can collect £40k a week for never playing?
Dyke's commission appears to have said to themselves from the outset, how can we develop Premier League footballers without touching the Premier League? Well, if your problem is the Premier League, the disproportionate income there and the way they spend it, then leaving it untouched isn't going to solve anything. And there must be something wrong with the spending, because - looking at 2012/13 figures - despite the Premier League having around 35% more income than the Bundesliga, they collectively lost £207m against a profit of £47m in the German top flight.
But then Germany's football culture is one of fans owning football clubs for the benefit of the fans, not Arab or Russian disposable playthings or trophies. No wonder it's different. No wonder they're interested in developing German players for their German teams. No wonder they're not going to simply pass the fans' or sponsors' money into the pockets of players (avg. 38% wages:turnover ratio in the Bundesliga compared to 68% in the Premiership) or agents.
I do wonder if the FA might have been better talking to the Football League rather than the Premiership. They're much more open to trying ideas out, such as developing a new model for English football. Except, of course, they won't want to rock the Premier League boat and risk their charitable handouts.
Our football is sick. In the traditional sense of the word.
The frustrating thing is, the changes I have suggested would make a difference because we are not far off in manay ways. Far enough that nothing will change unless we change - but the change is doable.
The power of the premiership is a big issue. If you say to Man City - in 5 years time, 5 of your team has to consist of home players - their instinct would be to fight it rather than embrace it and try to make it work. These clubs are monsters that are hard to fight. But let's identify them for what they are - that would be a far more productive start. They are part of the reason we are rubbish, because they won't allow the measures we need to take to address the issues.
Are they all taught the same methods?
Is it their training (the coaches) that is drip feeding down and producing technically deficient players as the same tired ideas are being passed to each new coach?
Are their qualifications significantly different to other countries?
i.e. Its all well and good saying that 5 players have to be home-grown but some of these big Premier League teams have youth squads made up of foreigners too.
Manchester United for example have bought through Paul Pogba and Adnan Januzaj, Arsenal Fans bang on about looking forward to seeing Gedion Zelalem who is bloody German whilst Manchester City and Chelsea am not sure if they even have Youth Academies anymore
While our qualifications are the same on the surface as the rest of Europe once you delve deeper you come to realise we are still very much in the dark ages. The people training coaches and giving them opportunities in England do not want innovative new ideas. The tried and tested old methods used to work and we will stick to them. An anecdote from when I was getting my badges is that when we tried to introduce concepts from rugby the "old boy" running the course told us "if you want to play rugby then go f'ing play rugby and get off my course. This is football". You learnt from a set book and you didn't deviate from it.
Even outside of coaching circles we have a far narrower view than the rest of Europe. You see comments, even on here, that you have to have been a former player to know the darker arts of the game, but this is part of the problem. This mindset just sees you stick to what you know and you don't bring in new ideas. You need outside ideas to take you past the confines of your experience.
Until we break away from these stereotypes and ideas we are doomed to keep following the same pattern and our game will continue to fall behind the rest of the world. We won't produce the next Mourinho, Löw or (closer to home) Jose Riga. No coach over here would get the chance to come up with cogitraining. We look at Brazil and say we want to use futsal and copy them. But we are missing the key lesson of innovation, we aren't trying to adapt our game and ideas to the new world. We are trying to fit the new world around our archaic ideas.
If you have two young players, joe and bob, and you can only take one which do you pick. Joe is bigger, he has an eye for goal and the natural attributes you attach to a footballer and he knows it and therefore doesn't work as hard as he should. Bob is smaller, the bigger kids push him about a bit on the pitch but he has the vision to pick out a pass and the knack for reading the game a bit better. He will never be the strapping young lad who is your stereotypical player but he will work harder than anyone else to get to the top.
In England 9/10 coaches will pick joe. In Europe 9/10 will pick bob.
We need to change but the change needed is so drastic it won't be allowed to happen.
We need to find the players that have this in their locker and give them the confidence to develop. Our current system has boys playing for clubs as part of a system and they are berated when they try to express themselves. Coaches look for an advantage be that physical or playing a system to an unproportional pitch. That is the English way – we need to open the door to these players and realise that they may not develop until they are 17 or 18 or even later – but find as many of them as we can. They shouldn’t be scared of failure, but be given the tools and support to succeed. Not all will of course- most won’t but more will – that is the point.
Eileen Drury .......
Praps.
The Premier League stands by and allows their clubs to stockpile the best players from all over the world, way too many to ever play, in the hope that some of them will turn out to be brilliant - the rest will simply be discarded with very little useful football to have developed their game. This is the problem Danny Mills thinks the B-League will solve, but it will just give more opportunity to stockpile even more players and less genuine opportunity to develop.
Limit the number of players - young or otherwise - any club can have registered, make home-grown mean home-grown, and maybe some of them (at all ages) will find first team football or ship out elsewhere earlier.
Could you imagine Poyet moving to Chelsea in a couple of years, on, say £100K pw, meaning £5.2M pa. Net of the first £200K he earns £5M pa meaning £250K per year to Charlton's academy. Likes of Palmer, Huddart the same...suddenly it makes a significant change to how clubs outside the PL can fund their academies.
Could this work? Surely the players could not begrudge giving back to the club that gave them their opportunity.
Alternatively, FA grows some balls. Takes a one off 10% of all PL TV money for say 5 years, gives all league clubs a share to upgrade/improve their academies so they are state of the art and have proper coaching to a certain agreed standard.
Totally agree with Atletico in that we need more top class academies - at the top 44 clubs. We also need way more qualified coaches so a slice of the TV money could and should fund both.
I don't really believe in home player quotas and certainly wouldn't want to dismantle the current TV deal...just use it to fund grass roots development
With regard to the future, I don't envy Greg Dyke's task. We really have to rip up every single playbook we have been using over the past 20 odd years. It's like we've been drip feeding the next generation arsenic and we're slowly dying.
There's a number of problems. Too much money in the Premiership is killing everything. Managers will not gamble with young English talent through fear of the sack. Those youngsters that do come through and make an impact are massively over paid compared to how good they actually are. Compare it to a business. Managing Directors get paid big money because they are the top talent in their organisation. At every level down after that, the pay is tiered to reflect responsibilities/achievements. As a youngster, you typically start at an entry level position on an entry level wage. Football gets this arse about face. Entry level wages to the chosen few that do make it in football are counter productive. Jack Wilshere. Here is a guy that to be honest, plays for an overrated team who won their first trophy in 9 years. Jack is probably paid £60k odd a week (maybe more) having not really proved himself as a winner (yet). Against Italy, he was dire. Came on, gave the ball away with most of his touches. Yet Jack, like many others, without having proved they are the best at what they do, are getting remuneration that in any other industry would suggest they are the dogs bollocks. Now, he and others that are the emerging talent, are so hyped up that I do not believe they have grafted nor have the sort of discipline it takes to be winners.
Secondly, As Rikofold and Mutley pointed out, our youngsters up bringing is based on a physical game where they are taught about winning at the expense of technique right from the off. Now it's been 20 years since I was at secondary school, but I remember a certain type of person always being picked in the team over others. Fast and tall. Because you were taller than others and may have been faster at the age of 13, doesn't necessarily mean you will end up taller, faster or stronger by the time you are 16 (or better). This country's obsession with physical players means that technique is secondary. It infiltrates every aspect of our game. No disrespect to someone like Pulis, because what he does he does very well. But with the likes of him and Sam Allardyce and their approach to the game, means we continue to accept this way of playing, and young players are brought up to understand this is part of the game.
The B league as pointed out will bring all the youth players that the likes of Mourinho don't want, together with a Graham Westley XI kicking lumps out of them every week.
For me, we get the best foreign coaches, or pay for all British coaches to study the best models abroad and implement them country wide as a blueprint from the moment the young players play at school, clubs and whatever level. It will take some balls, and I don't know if it's legally even possible, but the FA then need to up this crap about 8 homegrown players. Scrap that, it should be 8 English players, and a minimum of 4 named in the match day squad. Not Scottish, not Welsh (they can sort their own problems out). Redress the balance. I'm not saying we don't have foreign players, I'm just saying it's disgraceful the Premiership has the power to manipulate the rule to be 8 homegrown players, yet someone like Fabregas counts as a homegrown player.
Until we get under the patio and take out the root of the weed, we'll be left with great club players like Gerrard and Lampard, but put them on the world stage and they are 2 examples of players never, ever, ever good enough. And then I can stop writing silly league tables about where we've finished after 3 games and I can just believe again, or even have pride. They've stripped me of my pride, and are destroying future generations' enjoyment of the game. They soon get old enough to become a shell and cynical like me:(
Better someone like Hoddle than Aidy Boothroyd, who may I remind you as a role in the FA youth set up:( He's probably doing everything he can to identify the next Marlon King......
As far as coaching goes Germany has 28,400 (England 1,759) coaches with the B licence, 5,500 (895) with the A licence and 1,070 (115) with the Pro licence.
As he has invited people to come up with better ideas – what should happen is that supporters from every club in the country work together to present radical grass root ideas- such as more coaches – a grass roots Czar and demand the FA implement them. The issue is that there would mostly be apathy as English fans probably do have the national team they deserve.
All together now:
"Get over it, that's football..."