In recent years the English Premier League has been seen as the best league in the world, especially if it is to carry on from what we saw in last year’s campaign.
Last season saw one of the most open contests in the league’s 20 year history, with both Manchester clubs battling for the trophy to the last seconds of the season and the relegation zone changing near enough every week.
With more and more money coming into the Premier League, there have been a vast amount of big money transfers bringing in some of the world’s best players. Even the newly promoted teams usually have to dig deep into their wallets to have any chance of survival.
The amount of foreign players and even foreign managers now in the Premier League will soon enough, if not already, have a huge knock on effect towards English football and the national team.
And we can see the effects of this in today’s game. With England’s ‘golden generation,’ of Terry, Ferdinand, Gerrard and Lampard, slowly disappearing with not many filling in the empty gaps.
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There seems to be a lack of English youngsters breaking through the first team at a club level, with a growing trend of many young starlets with a load of hype not making the big break.
It was looking promising for England in 2009, when the U21’s reached the final of the European U21 Championship, but fell to a 4-0 drubbing by Germany. But still left many English fans hopeful with the amount of talented youngsters they had coming through.
However, looking at both teams in that final in 2009 and it is the German players that have made the big step. A total of seven, who played in the final, were included in the German Euro 2012 squad and England only using three players that played in their recent squad.
Many of those English players had a great amount of hype to their name after the tournament but haven’t accomplished much since, such as; Onuoha, Gibbs, Mancienne and Adam Johnson all struggling to make their way back into the national team and at a decent club level. And you can’t hide the fact that this is mainly due to the lack of first team football at a top level.
However, this also brings the argument whether there needs to be an attitude change, for instance, in Germany following their uncharacteristically early exit from Euro 2004, new coach Jurgen Klinsmann and assistant at the time Joachem Lowe were brought in and quickly saw to completely overhaul the stereotypical safe and rigid German style of play.