Wenger’s Policy is Killing Our Game?

While the footballing world drool over Arsene Wenger's latest crop of foreign youngsters, Lewis Doe asseses the impact it has made on the modern game and fears the days of homegrown talent coming through the ranks could be a thing of the past. 

What has happened to the days of top flight clubs going to local parks and playing fields and scouting out the top talent from various grass root league clubs? This is a question that in the modern day football climate is never going to get answered. 

The emphasis of the top clubs in England today has fallen more towards establishing links overseas with foreign clubs and taking their best talent, as opposed to looking in our own country and nurturing gifted players in to top flight English football. 

For example, current Premiership champions, Manchester United, have links with French club Nantes and Portuguese club Sporting Lisbon, acting on the information of their top scouts in these respective countries, relying on them to produce the next Cristiano Ronaldo or Nani.  

What top flight clubs need to be doing is to look at bringing young and gifted English players through their academies. Young English players are bought up on the game, no where else in the world is passion for football as great as it is in this country. Bringing a Portuguese or Brazilian player over at an early age can not only affect their ability, due to the aggressive nature of the English leagues, it can also affect the mental states of these young men.  

Academy production has done no harm what so ever for clubs like Middlesbrough and Newcastle, in fact these teams represent clear proof that the academy system can still work. Boro have produced England internationals in the recent past such as Lee Cattermole, Andrew Taylor and Stewart Downing and the setup at Newcastle United even had former Chelsea boss, Jose Mourinho, stating that Newcastle had a better club setup than the West London side. 

It is hard for young English players to get their foot through the front door when the top teams in England are signing players left, right and centre from ages as young as six, seven or eight. Good players, reaching double figures in age, are barely given a look in. Week in and week out thousands of youth club sides trek to and from parks across the country, yet unless their name ends with ‘inho’ or they smash in four or five hat-tricks in a single game, they are not even considered. 

This is easy to say but how then must all this change? There must be dozens of personnel at clubs like United, Chelsea, West Ham, Liverpool to name but a few, that are chomping at the bit to do their bit for their club. How much hassle really is it to send a couple of scouting staff from each club to go and watch a couple of games in their local area one weekend, furthermore it could be effectively costless and if a diamond in the dirt is found, then millions could be made on that player.  

Furthermore it will benefit out national side. England’s recent struggle during European qualifying and the late Sven Goran Eriksson era can’t be put down purely to bad luck. A part of that has to be the number of foreign players in the English league, learning and getting used to our game. For example it won’t surprise anyone if Arsenal names a squad without a single English player for their next game. 

The atmosphere during the build up and of a top flight game is absolutely priceless, but any enthusiastic fan or lover of the great game will tell you; there is nothing quite like going to watch the next generation of football players in this country compete on a bitter Sunday morning down the local park, with Dads shouting at their sons, there is nothing quite like it, let’s hope this doesn’t die.