Agreed, Ireland would be f***** for one.
Not fair if a team has no worthwhile national league that they should be forced to bring lesser players. This would all just play into the hands of the big nations, which goes against what you're saying about trying to stop the superpowers always winning.
Short-term yes, but long-term it may actually force nations to start developing their own game from the bottom up, their leagues and for homegrown players to play their football "at home". The globalisation of the sport is ruining the game for smaller nations whose best players as soon as they show even a modicum of talent are leaving to play in other countries which has a massive and underestimated negative effect on their own footballing culture. The world game is very much like our own Premiership, dominated by the big leagues with all the talent floating at the top, the rest becoming bottom feeders fighting over the scraps.
As a result competition is almost non existent.
The biggest example of this is Scotland, for years their best players have played in England which helped their national team no end, true, however every fabric of Scottish football with every departure slowly but surely loosened, thus wrecking their own competitions to such an extent it has affected player development to the point where the national team manager is checking out the family tree of players like Nigel Quashie whose roots are Ghanaian, just to put a competitive team together.
Competitions like the World Cup were designed so players could represent their country and the game in their country, to promote the game in their own country, over the years that has changed however. Most of the French football team are not representing their own game, but ones in England, Spain, Italy etc. for example.
Perhaps forcing such a policy would be the wrong way to go... OK, make it a voluntary option then and reward those that sign up with funding to help the game in THEIR OWN country, to improve facilities and such.
The game is in danger of falling in on itself as the foundations are very weak and the global sport has a duty to first protect the interests of every nation and not itself, or rather the bigger nations, and that isn't happening. The result. Go to any country outside of the big leagues and the standard of football is appalling.
The Dutch who produce fantastic players are going to become the next Scotland, mark my words. Years of losing their better players will catch up with them and bite them on the arse big time, regardless of how successful they are at producing players.
Ironically all this will impact nations most at international level, as Scotland have found out.
In short in order to protect international interests, you have to first protect domestic ones as the two go hand in hand, if one suffers, so will the other.
Nations like Africa will never fulfil their potential because all their best players will leave to play outside of Africa. Short term their national teams will do well because their players are learning a new game and using that experience to good effect, but they aren't taking it back home with them for the next generation so ultimately their national teams will suffer.
Cameroon showed the way in 90 with their team of unknowns - but have taken a turn for the worse since as all their best players were snapped up by clubs from the big nations. It has happened to Nigeria too and will happen to the likes of Ghana, Ivory Coast et al.
Think the problem with Scotland has been the fact of too many poor Bosmans stifling home grown talent which has led to the inability to develop players who are good enough these days to compete in the premiership and at international level. May be an idea that for european competitions, league games etc to have a squad of players has to be registered similar to the 22 players per squad at international competitions but must include a proportion of players who are home grown ie developed in the country to which the club belongs.
HTT, I think your heart is in the right place but ultimately you just don't understand the realities of football outside of the European "core."
Fact: Asian and African leagues will not start to experience some sort of miraculous growth because FIFA compels local federations to develop their domestic competitons. How long did it take for England to develop its current set of institutions? A hundred years? More? Football in these regions has only really been taken seriously for a couple of decades now, and as a result many of these leagues don't even have the most basic things an English fan would take for granted. The Korean league (K-League) still does not have a working promotion/relegation system, or even a second division comprised of full-time players. Youth academies are nearly non-existant. Many first division clubs lack a consistent supporter base and have to be propped up by large corporations. Last season, the reigning champions averaged less than 5,000 in attendence, and a second division club refused promotion to the top flight because they didn't think it would be woth the expenses. All this from a country that sells out it's 65,000 seat ground for every single international friendly.
All of these problems exist not for lack of trying, but because setting up a functioning professional sports league takes time. A lot of time. It takes decades for fans to form strong bonds with their local club, possibly more for things like multi-tiered leagues to be agreed upon. Forcing countries to rely on domestic players would not magically solve all of these problems, it would simply make teams from the "periphery" unable to compete at all on the international level, thus killing a large amount of the interest for football in these countries.
There is no snap solution for development of football in Asian and Africa. It's going to take a lot of time and money, and even then, these leagues will probably never be on level with European ones, just like we can't realisitically expect Honduras or Botswana to ever be as prosperous as the US or the UK. Radical strategies run the risk of severe backlash and/or just killing any interest in football as a whole.
Granted, I think the idea might work out for places like Holland or Scotland, where already strong leagues are on the decline.
As for Germany 06...
Whatever happened to Maxi Rodriguez? I thought he'd be the next big thing after seeing him against Mexico.
