“We already have a small talent pool and it’s getting smaller,” Dyke said. Liverpool looked for talent at U21 Euros – but they already own two of the winnersĭyke reeled off some more statistics: only 25 per cent of those players signed by Premier League clubs that summer had been English (and most of them by clubs in the bottom half) English players accounted for just 32 per cent of those in starting line-ups in the Premier League the previous season (down from 69 per cent in 1992-93 and 38 per cent in 2002-03) of the 220 players who started matches in the Premier League the previous weekend, only 65 (29.5 per cent) were English - and there were serious concerns about the quality as well as the quantity.Did that really happen? Barbados v Grenada and a deliberate own goal.English football was not developing enough players of the required calibre and when it did, there were concerns about both the lack of opportunity at Premier League level and the absence of a recognisable culture in the national team setup.
The under-19s and under-17s failed to qualify for their respective European Championship finals that summer.
The same summer, at the Under-20 World Cup in Turkey, England finished bottom of a group containing Iraq, Chile and Egypt. Only a handful of the others ( Wilfried Zaha, who switched allegiance to the Ivory Coast, Nathaniel Clyne, Craig Dawson, Jonjo Shelvey, Nathan Redmond and, eventually, Jason Steele) went on to establish themselves in the Premier League.
Of the squad Stuart Pearce took to Israel, only Jordan Henderson and Danny Rose won more than 20 caps for England at senior level. They would go on to finish bottom of their group at the 2014 World Cup and crash out of Euro 2016 against Iceland in the round of 16.Īt that summer’s European Under-21 Championship finals, England had finished bottom of their group, beaten by Italy, Norway and Israel. Since reaching the quarter-finals of three consecutive tournaments under Sven-Goran Eriksson, England had failed to qualify for Euro 2008, been outclassed by a far younger, slicker Germany team at the 2010 World Cup and seen their limitations exposed by Italy at the quarter-final stage of Euro 2012. With the number of homegrown players in the Premier League falling sharply by the year, Dyke warned of a bleak future for England at international level. Its huge success, he said, had come at a cost for homegrown players and for the England men’s team, which was enduring one of those familiar periods of sustained underperformance. Twenty-two years on, in September 2013, the same TV executive, Greg Dyke, was chairman of the FA when he chose the same venue to issue his rallying cry.ĭyke spoke of the “unintended consequences” of the Premier League’s growth.
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