The Championship Expects

"The Liverpools and the Arsenals - what are they contributing at national level?"

Or so queried Steve Gibson, chairman of Middlesbrough Football Club, following the latest drab England defeat, and following another drab series of critiques of the English game.

But perhaps the problems need to be directed elsewhere, in particular at the teams occupying the lower order of the premiership. Or, more specifically, clubs such as Gibsons own. Finding international footballers for the future does not just stop at opening an academy.

One of the previously enduring strengths of English football has been its extremely successful professional setup, where lower league teams nurture English players prior to them moving on to a higher level “finishing school”. The premiership has now become something of a closed-shop where this is concerned. The transition from Championship to Premiership is almost non-existant. If premiership clubs are no longer willing to speculate on lower league talent, the gene pool shrinks quite dramatically. The inevitable and logical conclusion to this has to be a downturn in developed talent available to the international team.

Sam Allardyce, in particular, has been vocal in the past about the cost of buying English players from the lower leagues in England in comparison to importing from abroad. Indeed, Allardyce agreed with much of Gibsons recent sentiments;

“I've just signed on four young players for the future. None of them is English and it has cost us no more than a million euros. If you look at the price Gareth Bale at Southampton is being touted around at,, it just shows the lack of young players being developed in this country.”

However, it seems Allardyce and his peers are missing the point, whilst entirely reinforcing where matters are amiss. The reason the prices being quoted for these players is so high is not simply a case of an overvalued market. It is a reflection of the fact that the players in question, when making this transition, will be successful and will, in the long term, represent value for money. Quite simply, many of the traditional stumbling blocks imposed upon a foreign player seeking to carve out a career in the Premiership are non-existant with a player from the football league.

The success of recent English players when stepping into the Premiership from the Championship should make the case very evident. Players of the calibre of Dean Ashton, Darren Bent, Tom Huddlestone, Steve Sidwell and Andy Johnson have all become pivotal players to their premiership clubs and all have found themselves in or around the international setup. Yet, David Nugent, perennial Preston top-scorer, continues to ply his trade in the Championship and is one of several players wondering if his value is really so inflated in the light of the success of his recently departed Championship counterparts.

It is wishful thinking to expect that any of the very top premiership sides would be able to improve their squads by drawing from the Championship, which is entirely why the likes of Bolton, Middlesbrough and Manchester City are the teams who are in the best position to improve the pool of English players in the premiership in this respect. Yet by his own assertion, managers such as Allardyce would rather gamble small amounts on several foreign players in the hope that one of them will come good, with the remainder being written off. Whilst this kind of approach remains in place, it seems rather misplaced to direct complaints on the state of the English game, and its international side, elsewhere.