England's Underachieving Footballers

[Martin Lol]

 

............In a recent round of the Champions League there were 50+ Brazilian players, 30+ from each of France, Spain and Italy and 10 from England. There were more Dutchmen, Romanians, Serbians, Turks and Czechs than Englishmen.............

 

...................The FA lags behind other nations in the quantity and quality of their coaching. A player at an English academy has two or three coaching sessions a week; on the continent it's five per week. "Damien Comolli, the Sporting Director at Tottenham Hotspur, a London club, calculates that a player in his native France clocks up 2,304 hours of coaching between 12 and 16, twice as many as an English player. And whereas an Englishman will spend much of that time playing matches (a poor way to develop skill, as each player spends a small fraction of a game in possession of the ball), the continental player will be honing his technique."...................

 

.....................After France's failure to qualify for the 1990 and 1994 World Cups they opened a National Academy at Clairefontaine. They won the 1998 World Cup and the 2000 European Championships, and made the World Cup Final in 2006. The FA's plans for an English version of this academy (planned for Burton-upon-Trent) has been held up for 5 years. The reasons? Partly because the money set aside was required to help pay for the cost overruns of Wembley Stadium and partly to placate the Premiership clubs that were unhappy at losing control over their young players................   

 

Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA's director of football development, believes British players are already “damaged goods” by the time they enter academies, typically at the age of nine.

 

http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=526360&story_id=10186049

 

 

Not exactly new information but depressing reading nevertheless.