Foreign Player Restrictions In English Football

I don't know about anybody else but for me international football is the absolute pinnacle of the sport. The best players of a nation come together to play against the best players of another nation.

The international competitions should produce the best football games in the whole world, and often it does. Football has, in my opinion, a global reach much more than other sports as almost every county in the world has a professional national team.

If you follow the theory that the best players of a country form the national team then England's national squad should be, in theory, the best in world. But it isn't. It should be.

We have the best league in the world, the EPL, from which our teams always do well in the Champions League and the FIFA Club World Cup. So why is it that our national team regularly under-performs in tournament's—in the 2008 European Cup we didn't even qualify.

The answer is simple. Our Premier League is heavy in foreign talent. Undoubtedly they are very good at what they do and they are what makes us the best league in the world. But the responsibility to England as a football is too great.

Therefore a English player quota should be introduced, meaning clubs should have to field a certain number of English players. This measure is for the sole purpose in raising the standard of the national team.

We may be seeing a good run under Capello but we only have to remember the disaster in Austria to know that things could be better. As the exporter of football around the world England should have a national team worthy of that heritage.

The introduction of such a quota would force clubs to develop their own talent, increasing the quality of English players as clubs invest more time and effort in their own talent.

This would create a bigger pool of players for a manager to select from and also create competition for each place as two or three very good players compete against each other for the same spot.

I am aware that such a change in the rules, even a small one (three or four players), would be a major problem for many clubs. Arsenal for example has only Theo Walcott as  a credible first team English player.

Therefore such a change should be delayed for a time to allow clubs to prepare for the change. After this date the number of players should be gradually increased until we get to about at least four or five English players in every club.

In the long run this would in part raise the standard of our national team but also possibly slightly lower the standard of the EPL for a while but this would only be a temporary thing I am certain with the vast amounts of money available to Premier League clubs.

However there might be another at stake. Our players just aren't motivated enough. I will deal with this in a separate article. However the changes suggested could raise the quality of English players as a whole and thus raise the standard of the team.

Do you agree? Or am I completely wrong?