Is English football an incurable disease? Part 3

English teams were British teams

If we’ve never been as good at international football as we’ve always thought, perhaps the reason is that we have never had enough quality and strength in depth. I think we created this problem for ourselves, first unintentionally, and then, in the last two decades, deliberately.

After 18 years of the FA Premier League and all the clamour around foreign players, people seem to have forgotten that club sides in the old English First Division were rarely made up of just English players. Our top teams all had at least 3, 4 or 5 players in key roles who were Scottish, Welsh, Irish. There are still one or two dotted about – Giggs, Fletcher, Healy - but not in the same numbers as before. They’ve been replaced by other ‘foreigners’. But the same principle applied back then as applies today – fewer English players in teams by choice = less strength in depth for the English national team.

You won’t care about that if you support Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United, Tottenham or Manchester City. It’s many years since most of you had an English manager, let alone an English owner, so why should a team made up entirely of foreign players cause you any concern, as long as it’s successful? But the rest of us care. The majority. Those of us who still hold true that dream of football every five year-old has.

60 years ago, when all this was in its infancy, the fact that our top English teams were actually mixtures of the Home Nations was something that (a) we ignored and (b) our European neighbours were irritated by. For historic reasons, we had been very used to accommodating the Scottish, Welsh and Irish into our English way of life. Our European football competitors regularly pointed out that we should have only one Great Britain team, to reflect the everyday status of our football league system. Maybe there was a moment after the Second World War, or in the 1950s, when there could have been a Great Britain team that went on to a world-beating future. But, truth is, not many people actually wanted it, except the Europeans. And the times were all about the shedding of empire and the acquiring of independence. Besides, if you had a good team, why sacrifice it for a Great Britain team? And the Home Nations had good teams. The 1958 World Cup in Sweden saw all four qualify – the only time this has happened. Wales and Northern Ireland even made the quarter finals of a 16-team competition.

Even when England was awarded and won the World Cup in 1966, this did not stop international footballing institutions pointing at the existence of four national teams in two small islands. In qualification for the 1968 European Championship finals, UEFA put England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland together in one group that could produce and progress only one winner. While Scotland actually beat the new World Champions shortly after that victory, England went forward and actually lost in the semi-finals, to Yugoslavia, in Italy, our only semi-final tournament appearance overseas. Bizarrely, the home nations qualifying group was formed by combining the results of the 1966-67 and 1967-68 British Home Championships. We wouldn’t stand for that today.

We didn’t know we were building weakness into our system

The English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish FAs had developed separately back in the 19th century. There was always the intention to go it alone. But we have to ask why English club teams took players from the Home nations. The answer could be that, as the economic giants among them, they could. It’s surely not that there was not enough talent locally. We were a mixed nation, where Scots, Welsh and Irish lived and worked among the English. Cardiff, Swansea and Wrexham refused to join a Welsh League, understanding the economic implications. We were a small nation. Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff are not far from London or Manchester. It was never a clear strategy. It just happened. It didn’t tend to work the other way round, however. England was just the hub of football action in the UK.

So, in the 50s onwards, when people started taking notice of international football, our top teams were never filled totally with English players. This meant that, from the very start of our international ambitions, there was never strength in depth or any English way of playing. Successful club sides adopted different styles – Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, in particular – but there was no consistency. It was a period when League and Cups were won every year by a different team. For example, in the 10 years between 1945-55, 8 different teams won the FA Cup and 7 different teams won the League. 1955-65, 9 different clubs won the FA Cup and 7 different teams won the League. 1965-75, 10 different teams won the FA Cup and 7 different teams won the League. 1975-85, 7 different clubs won the FA Cup, and 4 different teams won the League.

So, there was no English way. Until 1966. Bizarrely, the one big blip in all this was England winning the World Cup in 1966 with Ramsey’s ‘wingless wonders’. But this has always been the exception that proves the rule. The tail that wags the dog. Past romance over present reality. And, as is typical with any English sporting successes, no sooner had we achieved it, than we lost the spark.

The earlier unintentional misalignment between English club football and English national football actually suited the Scots, Welsh and Irish because, by and large, their top players were playing in the English league against better players. Not surprising then that they had good national teams in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Look at them now – the place of British players in top English league teams has been taken by other ‘foreigners’ from around the world. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all slipped down the rankings. Their players find it harder to get into the top teams. They get less exposure to top-level football. They lose strength in depth. Well, the same has happened to English players in our own League. Some of our top teams, particularly Arsenal and Liverpool have played first teams featuring hardly any Englishmen. Some people say ‘So what!’ As I said at the beginning of this essay, I believe it’s wrong to put club before country. If you disagree with that, then you won’t want to see any change. But my whole argument is based on seeing the national game as the pinnacle to which a 5-year-old footballing kid could and should aspire, then creating the conditions for that to be possible.

Every successful English club side was a Team GB

People point out to me that, if I supported one of those clubs that keep winning, I would be quite happy with the status quo. As I don’t and that perpetually winning scenario is hypothetical, I feel free to air my views about this historical problem with English strength in depth.

If, due to the British contingent, the England national team did not have as many quality players to draw on as it might, at least it had enough in 1966 for England to win the World Cup on home soil. And, before 1984, none of the 7 English European Cup winning sides had ever fielded fewer than 7 Englishmen in a starting line up of a final.

In 1984, Liverpool changed that. It was down to 4, and one of those was really Australian. But the club had its reasons for that, as we’ll explore in Part 4. By the time Liverpool lost for the first time in the tragic Heysel encounter in 1985, this was down to 2. In all instances, only on very rare occasions were any of these ‘foreigners’ from outside the British Isles. The next time an English club side won the European Cup, in 1999, there were only 4 Englishmen in the side. By this time, ‘British’ players were deemed foreigners and Manchester United featured players from Denmark, Norway, Holland, Ireland, Wales, Sweden and Trinidad & Tobago. So, even the pipeline for British players was largely gone. Little surprise, then, that their national teams went down the pan. Yet Scotland had been strong enough to rival England in the 60s and 70s, even qualifying for World Cups when England didn’t.

This is not a call for Team GB. That’s a different conversation. And, as we’ve seen with the fiasco around the British football team for the 2012 Olympics, it’s all too political. It’s pathetic that the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish FAs have pulled out of Team GB for the 2012 Olympics on the grounds that they could not gain assurances from FIFA that playing under one flag would not affect their status. What status? Their individual flames are at their lowest since football records began. At 41st in FIFA rankings, Scotland is worse than Gabon, Israel and Peru; at 59th, Northern Island is worse than Burkina Faso, Lithuania and New Zealand; at 84th, Wales is worse than Cyprus, Albania and Mozambique.

I’m just saying that because our English club teams of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s all contained between 3 to 7 players who were actually British, this had a negative effect on the strength and consistency of our national English football team. After 1966, we did not prevail. For too long, there has been a mismatch between the way our English club sides have been made up and the English national team. While this was an unintentional English/British problem, it’s now become a purposely created English/World problem.

Support the English national team or knock it down forever

The FA Premier League, in cahoots with the people who run our top clubs, has deliberately created a misaligned system which puts club before country. So, unless we change this, we’re crazy if we think that the English national team has any chance of competing successfully on the world stage.

The problems lie at the senior end, with the clubs in the FA Premier League being allowed to block the pathways for developing English talent. Today, aided and abetted by anti-English and anti-European satellite TV moguls, the entrenched powers that be at club level are so powerful and determined in their view that a few top clubs shall prevail, come what may, that it’s astonishing that we even maintain the pretence that the national game is the most important of all. Today, the national game is really a sideshow circus perpetuated by our national print media for the latter’s own purposes. Even Wembley, our national football treasure, is barely used for the purpose it was so expensively built and even then, the pitch is not fit for purpose.

In which case, isn’t it about time we admitted that and took it to its logical conclusion – the formation of a global league of the top clubs and to hell with the national game? Or shall we continue pretending? Or shall we consign the last 20 years of celebrity histrionics to the dustbin of experience and try to do something about restoring the national game to the pinnacle of footballing achievement? Do we even know how? Isn’t good football something that we forgot about somewhere in the long distant 1970s when we opted for ‘Kick and Rush’?

markgriffiths@idealconsulting.co.uk