England's Euro 2016 departure exposes deep problems

Like many of my friends and colleagues, I watched on Monday as England left Europe for the second time in a week. The responsibility for this embarrassing defeat to Iceland—a team ranked 23 places below England in the Fifa world rankings—was not 17m voters, but 23 very well paid players and a team of coaches.

For the first five minutes things looked promising, but it very quickly went downhill. At halftime 2-1 down, I think most people thought they would turn it round. But the second-half performance was abysmal. There was no hunger, no desire—at least there didn’t appear to be. They created almost no clear cut chances, the passing was negative and the substitutions had little effect. They had no new ideas: nobody on the pitch or the manager thought to tell Daniel Sturridge and Raheem Sterling, playing on their worse sides, to switch wings. The game became stale and predictable. Only 18-year-old Marcus Rashford caused problems during the five minutes he was on the pitch.

Social media reaction to the performance was swift. “Sterling value drops” wrote one tweeter. Another asked to sign a petition to run the game again. Others contained brutal facts: England’s manager Roy Hodgson was the highest paid coach at the tournament taking home £3.9m a year; Iceland’s coach is a part-time dentist. Iceland has the same population as Leicester (and apparently the same desire to create a real underdog story).

Then came the autopsy. Hodgson rightly came under fire for not knowing his best starting 11 players, or the best system. Rio Ferdinand, the former Manchester United and England defender, said if you don’t know those two things before a tournament “you’re going to run into trouble.” He wasn’t wrong.

Then there was the seemingly inexplicable decision to take Arsenal’s Jack Wilshere to the tournament, despite the fact he had only played just over 100 minutes of football all season due to injury. The decision to take him left Danny Drinkwater, who won the Premier League with Leicester City, watching the matches from his sofa. To be honest, he is probably relieved he wasn’t in France.

But England’s problems go much deeper.

Alan Shearer summed it up perfectly during Match of the Day last night (yes, I am that much of an England masochist: I watched the highlights right after the live match.) “We’re blinded by our Premier League. We think our Premier League is one of the best for talent. It’s not. We’re totally and utterly reliant on foreign players and foreign managers for this excitement. We’re not as good as we think we are. The players are not as good as we think they are.”

The number of English players in the Premier League is shockingly low. About 36 per cent of players in the Premier League are home-grown. Holland has the most (64.3 per cent), closely followed by Spain (62 per cent), France (58 per cent), Germany (50 per cent) and Italy (48 per cent). That tells us something—clubs in England are far more likely to buy a player from another country than looking for English talent in lower leagues or turning to their own academies. In contrast, clubs in Spain, Italy, Germany, France and Belgium nurture the talent at home. And why wouldn’t they be—it means their players build much better relationships with each other at club level that are directly transferrable on to the international stage.

We can moan about the predictability of foreign domestic leagues—the fact that Bayern Munich or Borussia Dortmund are likely to win the German Bundesliga every season, that Paris Saint Germain will probably win France’s Ligue 1 or that Barcelona, Real Madrid or Atletico Madrid will probably win La Liga in Spain—and that they are teams with large amounts of cash behind them and an abundance of foreign players. But the rest of the teams that make up those leagues are full of home-grown players who are getting experience playing in the biggest leagues in Europe either with or against some of the biggest names in the sport. Very few English players get that experience. None of the England team play abroad. If we really had an abundance of talent we might see more English players playing for clubs across Europe. The fact is that it’s simply not true. Our players are not good enough. Or don’t push themselves by testing themselves against the best.

There is little Roy Hodgson can do now. He walked into the press briefing after last night’s match and read his resignation letter to the press. The team is now no longer his responsibility, although it would perhaps have been nice for him to apologise to fans that have paid a lot of money to see their national team in France. At the press conference this afternoon, he didn’t explain why his team lost to Iceland. He just said: “I don’t really know what I’m doing here.” That sums it up.