It was hard to tell what was the more deafening noise as Iceland dumped England out of the European Championships on Monday night; the hypnotically spine-tingling celebrations led by Icelandic captain Aron Gunnarsson and involving around ten percent of the country’s population present in the stadium, or the clamorous guffaws from north of the border.
In recent years the level of anti-English feeling in Scotland during major international tournaments has abated somewhat, perhaps because our near-neighbours are no longer viewed as credible contenders to actually win one, but to many here it was too good an opportunity to miss.
And there-in lies the problem for England – the consistent shortcomings of their national team in recent years have led it to become a source of mirth to their rivals, rather than something to be envied.
A furious English football public will now seek recriminations as the country enters a period of navel-gazing and scapegoating, and again, almost all of this will miss the crucial point – that there is something fundamentally wrong with the culture of youth development in English football, and it stems from the national game being subsumed by the monster that is the English Premier League.
We in Scotland are acutely susceptible to the marketing of the EPL as the ‘greatest league in the world’, and so our footballing powers that be are prone to aping it – from the farcical re-branding of our leagues to the whole culture of youth development. Perhaps this latest failure for the England national side has finally and fatally exposed that culture as woefully inadequate, and in desperate need of a re-think.
The relentless cycle of hanging individuals out to dry will of course continue, but it will not yield any long-term benefit for England as their 50 years of hurt stretches on. Yes, Roy Hodgson must shoulder responsibility for adopting an ill-thought out system that made this England side less than the sum of its parts, and for being too loyal to out of form players like Jack Wilshere and Raheem Sterling, a man who currently inspires as much confidence as the currency that shares his name.
Goalkeeper Joe Hart will be cast as the main villain of the piece, and there is no doubt that his inadequacies have been brutally laid bare. He was criminally at fault for Iceland’s second goal, his left wrist showing all the fortitude of a wet paper towel as he allowed Kolbeinn Sigthorsson’s tame attempt to squirm under him. Gareth Bale’s long-range free-kick that drifted past him in the group stages was another blot on a personal copybook that came to resemble a Rorschach test, with four of the five shots on target that England faced during the tournament ending up in the back of the net.
It all led one newspaper to dub Hart as “everything that is wrong with English football,” as they pilloried him for embodying the tub-thumping, grandstanding hubris that has for so long been associated with the England national team, with none of the poise or class of a Gigi Buffon to back it up.
But technically-deficient and self-entitled players like Hart are the result of England’s flawed football culture and the riches on offer to distinctly average players like him in the monolithic Premier League. Why should he strive to improve, when he is raking in around £5million a year in the 'best league in the world'?
To call England’s exit from Euro 2016 a humiliation is to do a disservice to the excellent strides made by the Football Association of Iceland, but it very well could be the ‘reset’ moment that English football requires. Maybe England had to reach this nadir, this perceived rock-bottom, in order for their FA to finally confront the underlying reasons why their players are unable to cut it at the highest level of international competition.
The FA have invested £105million in the building of St George’s Park, an impressive facility, but one which has drawn criticism as a ‘white elephant’ that serves only elite players while contributing little to the production of young talent.
Iceland, for their part, are reaping the benefits of a community-driven approach to football that led them to build seven full-sized indoor facilities throughout the country and hundreds of all-weather pitches. Every single school in the country has access to one. But the FA, in building St George’s Park, were simply mimicking the Premier League approach to youth development.
EPL clubs pour cash into youth academies that hoover up thousands of young players from across the world before shedding them on mass as they move through the age-groups – missing out on any late developers. This leaves the best young players – not necessarily the best young English players – in development squads, where they will compete against players of the same age until approximately one percent of them make the jump to professional football. When they get there, they have little or no experience of playing against older players, as they would have in the old days when there was a thriving reserve league in operation.
When operated in such a way, the academy system has many glaring flaws, not least of which is that it is predicated on being able to accurately gauge the potential of a child aged eight as a future Premier League star. Most youth coaches accept that children of that age should be encouraged to play all sports recreationally, with access to the best coaching, so that they develop a more rounded skill-set. It was the adoption of such a culture over a decade ago that ultimately led to Iceland’s glorious moment in Nice on Monday evening.
It may be argued that it is easier to change the culture of a nation of 330,000 people rather than a nation of 60 million, but that is only true if the stakeholders – namely the clubs and the association – are unwilling to pull in the same direction.
Germany, it is easy to forget, found themselves in a similar scenario as England do now after they were dumped out of Euro 2000. The chairman of the German Football Association at the time, Gerhard Mayer, implemented a plan for the development of young German players and managed to get all of the Bundesliga clubs to unite behind it for the greater national good. More than 350 centres of excellence were set up across the country, allowing children access to better facilities and better coaching.
Eventually, the giants of the game – such as Bayern Munich – would take the best of the talent of course, but they would hone it for the good of themselves and also for the national side, where the coaching they receive is a continuation of that they receive from an early age. Ending short-termism and narrow self-interest in their footballing culture delivered the World Cup in 2014, and may yet deliver the European Championship a week on Sunday.
It is barely conceivable that such a spirit of cooperation could exist among the giants in the cut-throat world of the Premier League, but until it does, England will continue to stumble from one calamity to another. Would Arsenal, Manchester City or Manchester United take time to develop a young English player to benefit the national side? You wouldn’t bet your last Krona on it.
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