Ed- this piece was written by James Harrower, a new writer for the site.

The English premier league is widely regarded to be the best league in the world so it brings the best players to it, but is the influx of foreign players a good thing or is it seriously detrimental to the future of English football? It’s disgusting to think that Arsenal, a successful club based in North London regularly field a starting 11 with not one British, let alone English player.

Perhaps it’s not Steve McLaren we should be worried about with the state of the current National side; maybe we should be worried for the manager when the World Cup could possibly be hosted in England in 2018.  How many good English players will we have then, with the majority of the premier league taken up with foreign names?

It’s not just foreign players either, along with foreign managers we now have foreign owners in the league, to which all their funds have only secured lucrative contracts for foreign stars.  Since Roman Abramovich has bought Chelsea he has bought 8 English players and 21 foreign players, for huge exorbitant sums (£268m) who don’t always play.

Admittedly, the premier league would be a duller place without the likes of Ronaldo, Essien, Fabregas, Torres and Berbatov but we need to know how far down the list we need to go before we find an abundance of British talent.  Sepp Blatter’s foreign quote plan of 5 foreign players per team, per game could end up pushing the premier league behind La Liga and Serie A; however this could be a good thing, in the long term.  Although this would force a complete reshuffle of the Arsenal and Chelsea sides and major changes to many other sides, the National team would benefit profusely from the English players being played week in and week out, the majority of which would come from club academies.

It is time to decide whether we hold our league or our National team in higher regard as we seemingly don’t be able to succeed in both.

Posted on November 4th, 2007 |
Filed under: England