The revival of English football

Here comes Arsene Wenger again, as disingenuous as ever. Calling the new club squad quota rules ridiculous. Whingeing about how it will badly affect the chances of his club to keep competing domestically. His successful club may have to play 65 games in the season. Whereas a less successful Premier Club might play as few as 40. But what Wenger is actually against is this equalising measure that puts what seemed like the guaranteed success of his club at risk. He’s against fairness. He’s against anything which interferes with his self-proclaimed and long-pursued right to qualify for and win the Champions League.

The top English clubs (the same top clubs year in year out, note) get to play in Europe every year because they finish at or near the top of the league. Squad equalisation puts that automatic qualification under threat. Potentially, it opens up the game to new and upcoming clubs. Blimey, we might even get different clubs finishing in the top four year on year, without the need to spend millions on foreign players to do it. But that wouldn’t be fair for Wenger. He came to an already rich club in the Premier League with many advantages. A great coach with continental ideas. A foreign coach with fantastic contacts, able to dip into the youth academies of top French and Spanish clubs and lure out youngsters nurtured and raised from childhood in better systems. Three doubles later, Arsenal haven’t won a pot for 5 years. Ironically, it’s been their lack of squad depth towards the end of the season that has seen them fall when handily placed. So, when Wenger finally gets the money to spend on players, after ten years of canny buying, cradle-snatching and new stadium building, he finds that he is unable to grow his squad to the level required to challenge Manchester United and Chelsea. Not allowed. His fellow Europeans, Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini, have introduced the same quota system into domestic football that has existed in European competition for years.

Of course, Wenger tries to deconstruct this move in his own inimatable way, saying that the quota system’s goal designed to produce talented young English players is flawed. “There are as many foreign players in Spain as in England. You can sign players from all over the world in Spain. So why do they still produce players and we do not? It’s down to the coaching.” I love the proverbial ‘we’. By which he means England. Since when has he cared about promoting English players? To be fair, most top managers just want the best talent they get, English or not, and aren’t going out to deliberately develop English talent. But Wenger is the arch exponent of the tendency to remove English players entirely from English club football under the disingenuous claim that the talent just isn’t there. While on the other hand promoting coaching alongside top quality foreign players as the only way to bring on homegrown talent. You can’t have it both ways, Arsene. Finally, your time may well be over. Yes, you’ve signed up for another contract, taking you to 2014, and we believe you when you say your heart belongs to Arsenal. But, as much as we listen to what you say, we watch what you do. And those of us who want to see a strong national team do not believe that what you are doing helps our cause.

It’s all coming to a head. Wenger rightly asks that the Premier League has to decide whether it is here to be the top league in the world or to prepare the national team. After nearly two decades of the Premier League, we are now at that pivotal moment. It is only ever likely to go the way of big money. In the background, I think there’s already a movement to circumvent such interventions for equalisation. The G14 wasn’t set up so that any of its members would ever again disappear into mediocrity or oblivion. American businessmen have not taken over Arsenal, Manchester United and Liverpool just for a short term return on investment. The big English clubs, probably backed by their big European G14 co-members, are half-way towards a breakaway push, in alliance with American soccer.

This quota-based intervention will give Wenger and his ilk all the impetus they need but the battle for the soul of English football is now truly joined. I’m glad these new rules are making Wenger’s pips squeak. Something had to, if, that is, the English Premier League is not to become the Brazilian Premier League by 2015. By then, Wenger will probably be calling it a day in England. If this quota intervention had not happened, his legacy would be on the one hand a fabulously successful Premier League in terms of overall quality, but with many clubs in massive debt; and, on the other, an increasingly dysfunctional and troubled national England team culled from players in the poorer sides and even those from the Championship...a bit like Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

I like Arsene Wenger. It’s great to see some intelligence in a game dominated by thick bricks. But I don’t like what he’s done to English national football or his contribution to the preservation of an increasingly remote top four that think they have a God-given right to success at the expense of everyone else.

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk