Is There a Shortage of English Players in the English Premier League?

The mid-week Premier League fixture between Portsmouth and Arsenal was notable for one peculiar reason. It was an English Premier League match without a single English-born player in the starting lineups.

Does that matter?

I think maybe it does matter, both for what it might say about the state of the national game and its implications for the England team.

This is not some nationalist, foreigner-bashing rant I am writing, there are serious questions to be answered.

A local player effectively has to compete against the whole world for a place in a top team, and every imported player at the top level must mean one less place for an English-born player, which in turn reduces the pool of players available for national selection.

Few of us can have much confidence in England's ability to win the World Cup in South Africa this year, we have seen the team's poor record against other major nations. Could this be, at least partially, a consequence of our foreign-dominated premier league?

It is said the love of money is the root of evil, and I postulate that the superficial surfeit of money in the premier league is the cause of this problem. Managers are duty-bound to obtain the best players they can get, and if they are given budgets sufficiently large that they can comb the world for talent, then it is hard to criticise them.

And yet those very budgets are a contradiction. Portsmouth are staffed by expensive foreign players, but are under threat of bankruptcy—how crazy is that?

So what are the answers? A cap on players' salaries and/or transfer fees? A limit on the number of foreign players in a team?

You tell me, I'd love to hear your views.