Too many foreigners in English football?

Sometimes I just find myself banging my head against the wall. It seems these days that the press has become so lazy that they are happy to make the most flawed point, and just repeat ad infinitum until people just start to accept it. The best example of this at the moment seems to be the ongoing debate around quotas in football. Whilst I agree with the need for quotas within the English game the reason for doing so, is, I have to admit based on emotion and intuition as evidence at the moment fly's in the face of doing so.

The big justification that's used for the quota system in the press at the moment is how poor the England football team is, as evidenced by our failure to qualify for this years European Championships.

However anyone who knows anything about football can not deny that the England players of today are way better than the majority teams we've ever fielded, certainly in my life time.

There's two facts at the heart of this that people seem to choose to ignore. Sometimes freek/poor campaigns happen despite having great players. And the second fact, that everyone knew at the time, but has chosen to forget now as the story has ran its course, is that our manager was crap and completley out of his depth!

If your credentials for an England manager are to:

* never to have won anything
* have come very close to being sacked the season directly preceeding your appointment to the England job
* managed the most boring team in Premiership history

- then we definitely got the best man for the job.

So then the England team is not crap. How you can claim this when 3 out of 4 teams in the Champions League final are from the Premier League and 10 of the starting 22 player? But whilst the talented few get to train with the best players in the world on a daily basis this does result in there being fewer places in the top flight for English players. And although there is I am sure a point at which this becomes detrimental to English football I'm not sure we are yet at that inflection point. However I dont think many people would argue that a team like Arsenal who quite often field a team with no English players, is doing a great deal for the advancement of the English game - despite how good to watch they are.

So in closing is a quota system a good thing? I think in the long run it has to be. Why? Well as Ive said before its partly an emotional thing: If we're talking an English league then it's surely fair to expect that the majority of the players are English? The other part is just this concept of the inflection point that will inevitably come, where if things go on as they are, there just wont be enough English players in the top league to benefit from training with the best of the worlds talent.

So there that's my position on it.

But the interesting thing is when you take this line of thought and apply it to the wider and more important / more serious question of immigration. That raises a whole other load of questions... that I'll no doubt return to at some point. After all I plan to be an immigrant fairly shortly! LOL!