England houses the best and most prestigious league in the world, yet finds its national team plagued with a bout of chronic underachievement. National team regulars like Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard, and Steven Gerrard start among foreign superstars at their respective top clubs, so it isn’t a matter of a lack of talent. But the Three Lions glaringly lack talent.
 

So what gives in the England conundrum? Common answers will cite the Premier League, foreign owners, and a lack of restrictions on foreign talent as the national team’s biggest impediments, since the competitiveness of the league blocks opportunities for young English talent. But these explanations—while true— are too basic to serve as case and point. Our job here is to look deeper into these explanations and compose a more reasoned argument—our own Project 2010.
 

If we truly want to solve the England conundrum and consequently solve the biggest puzzle of player development, we need to identify the contributing factors, isolate each factor’s effect, and tie them into the convoluted big picture. Many of these factors are complicated enough to merit a book, but listed are basic explanations of key factors to think about:

Promotion/relegation (against development): The English Premier League is generally regarded a league that plays with house money— recently promoted Blackpool just earned a staggering £15M in TV rights money and more guaranteed money depending on how they finish in the league (£800K for last place, and an additional £800K for the next spot on the final standings). When all of this money is on the line, you don’t take risks. The experienced free-agent striker—think of a guy like Teddy Sheringham—might command higher wages, but the cost-benefit calculus of signing such a players over playing youth system players is affected by the money at stake. Without established signing Geovanni, Hull probably wouldn’t have survived its first season in the EPL (2008-2009), and wouldn’t have earned an additional £15M for the next season’s guaranteed TV money. It’s all about cost-benefit and risk-reward, and teams will always favor on the side of experience and security over the risk of fringe youth—this obviously hurts development.

“It's a results business... The Championship is very entertaining at the moment because about 12 clubs think they can win it. In the Premiership you've got 12 clubs shit-scared of relegation, and that's the difference,” said then-Birmingham City manager Steve Bruce in 2006. In this sense, the franchise model that is employed in America shines. Stability allows the Padres to take chances on the non-elite youngsters of the world, such as Aaron Cunningham, rather than feel compelled to sign Jim Edmonds like they did in the recent past.

Promotion/relegation (counter-point): Some teams recognize that they just won’t cut it in the Premier League, and take the first season’s appearance and prize monies and run with it. These teams (along with most lower-tier clubs) often will take chances on youngsters, within reason. That means that lower clubs will take bigger clubs’ young players on loan and give them the valuable EPL playing time that they need for personal development and national team development. Unfortunately, this is a phenomenon that has experienced mixed results in regards to player development. For every successful loan story (Tom Cleverly’s loan spell at Watford), there is a cautionary tale (Giuseppe Rossi’s loan spell at Newcastle). And for every successful loan spell, that doesn’t necessarily translate into success at the parent club (Ben Foster was wildly successful at Watford, but could never put it together at Manchester United)—promising young talent only is substantive should it be able to succeed at the highest levels, with the most successful clubs and around the most competitive and able athletes.

In addition, there is a cap on how many players a team can take on a season-long loan (to prevent worse teams from riding on the coattails of better teams), so the loan method is only so effective.

Our perception is often not reality: English player development insofar is a classic tale of the detriments of path-dependency. Even though the English Premiership just implemented “protectionist” measures by conforming to the 25-man roster (i.e. squad) size limit of other domestic leagues, much of the damage has been done on a macro-level.

By seemingly allowing foreign players to come in on a whim, the English Premier League has failed in helping national team development like La Liga or the Bundesliga have. However, this phenomenon is misconstrued.

Unlike other leagues that impose a cap on non-EU players allowed on a squad (usually 2 or 3 out of a 25 man squad), England employs a work permit system. Essentially, for a non-EU player to play in England, the player must have already accrued a certain amount of appearances on his respective national team.

This system considered, it seems somewhat counterintuitive that many consider the English system’s lack of nationality quotas detrimental to domestic player development. If only the best non-EU players can play in England, what makes the English system better than the Spanish, German, or Italian systems? In fact, the English system would seemingly be more restrictive than other leagues, since it really allows only the upper-tier teams to invest in non-EU talent. With this in mind, using the EPL as an exhaustive mechanism to criticize player development is befuddling—Blackpool will have as many domestic players as Reggina, or St. Pauli, or Sporting Gijon.

Additionally, since all of the European leagues accept EU players without restrictions, the EPL is on level ground with the likes of other elite European leagues.

Why is there an “English premium”? : Once perception is asserted as reality, it becomes reality. That’s why the EPL is seen as one of the leading detriments to player development. In the high-stakes EPL, urgency is preeminent and misperceptions are perpetuated in the rush. The system unfolds to the point where we think that elite English talent deserves more than market rate, and path-dependency does its damage from there. The simple answer to the “English premium” is that there are less elite English talents to choose from compared to the Spanish and German counterparts, and that may be true. But the domestic English league certainly isn’t as much of a detrimental factor as it is made out to be.
 

All in all, I hope that I provided a contrarian perspective to commonly-held perceptions. Perceptions and stereotypes exist for reasons, and some well-grounded and valid reasons, but that doesn’t mean they are completely exhaustive or comprehensively true. In the English case, the English Premiership is often derailed for things that it doesn’t deserve criticism for. The Premiership’s financial success causes us to portray the league as a cash-cow (which it is) and harmful to player development (read above), when it truly isn’t that much different compared to other continental leagues.
 

In this special case, the majority of the blame for the perplexing English problem lies elsewhere. Or better rephrased, a greater percentage of the blame must be attributed to what we perceive as already contributing factors—culture and the FA.

This is the first part of a series of columns that will explore the business of soccer abroad, and what Americans can take away from it as our domestic soccer system develops— we’ll attempt to formulate our own Project 2010.