Spurs old boy Chris Waddle hit the headlines after England lost their second World Cup game on the bounce.
What the one time Diamond Lighter had to say was absolutely correct. The problem is the Premier League. The league billed as one of the greatest in the world is, as far as English international football is concerned, has created a farce.
There a myriad reasons why the modern game in England stinks.
Let’s start with the obvious stuff. Where once you routinely saw kids kicking a ball anywhere they could get away with doing so, the streets and the parks are close to deserted.
Instead of buying their child a football, it’s easier to shell out for a Sega Megadrive. And if we’re honest with ourselves, probably safer too.
The odds of your son being abducted, raped and murdered whilst playing Tapper on an Amstrad 128k, in your own living room, are slight.
Aside from those keen to involve themselves in knife crime, kids aren’t out on the streets as much.
Since the advent of the Internet and the smartphone you’re more likely to find kids trying to drive a classmate to commit suicide through a concerted Facebook attack, or see them getting stuck into some vintage Germanic horse porn; rather than staying out practicing taking corners, until their mothers eventually manage to scream them into their homes.
The British government also deserve a special mention. You may be unsurprised to hear that I didn’t embrace the Olympics. The whole “legacy’ thing was so obviously cobblers.
Official Olympic merchandise appeared at clearance prices in Home Bargains before the games were over. Sport proceeded to go backwards in across the nation at an equally unseemly pace.
Basketball, synchronised swimming and women’s water polo, which all caused a great many of you to hoot with pride, all had their monies cut.
Basketball is apparently the 3rd most played team sport in the UK.
Goalball, visually impaired football and wheelchair fencing have gone completely. No money whatsoever for these Para Olympians. Those guys really did get laughed off. Good for feel good telly, good for nothing once the cameras stopped rolling.
Don’t worry too much, nearly 50% of Olympians are privately funded, so you’ll still be able to mindlessy cheer on some idiot who’s terribly brave at running in circles, even when he’s terribly tired, in Rio.
In 2013, the coalition were said to be selling off school playing fields at the rate of one every three weeks. The Tories must have been keen tell their Liberal lap dog just how lucrative a plan this was.
Some 10,000 playing fields were sold off between 1979 and 1997 under the Tories.
Under Labour, between 1997 and 2010, only 226 were sold.
But the number nobody gives a toss about is how many kids were completely deprived of the chance to play football, because of all these sales?
The word “grassroots” is bandied about, but let’s be frank. In the main, it’s a total lie window dressing.
The FA team up with a beer brand and in the guise of doing some good. Nefarious barely describes it.
Cue VT of a footballing household name mumbling something about children being the future; finishing on the designated campaign hash tag line, “together we can dream” (or whatever) while standing next the sponsor’s logo.
Just get it over with and let the world’s biggest heroin distributor to fund our infant schools.
The Premier League probably is one of the most entertaining leagues in the world, but the truth is, that little of the excitement is being generated by its English quotient.
The English aren’t producing technically gifted footballers. They are producing blokes that can secure lucrative contracts with multi- million pound businesses.
The quality of English youth coaching is in the main, uninspiring stuff. You can choose to bluster and whine, or do both, but it it is true.Word is, the FA have never visited Southampton’s Acadamy.
Have we truly advanced from “Give us 3 laps of the pitch and then we’ll see who goes in goal”? Obviously not, because some good players have come through, but they really aren’t representative.
The English appear to be specialising in turning out blokes who look like footballers, who aren’t actually very good …at playing football.
How many of the latest meager crop of up and coming Englishmen could genuinely command a place in any of the sides that do make it out of their group in this year’s World Cup? 2? 3? 1? Be honest. Iran looked better than England this afternoon, and some of those guys probably came perilously close to having pay for their own flights to the competition.
Meanwhile in England, there are kids of schoolboy age who have agents and contracts with Premier Clubs.
English football is like English industry. In truth, it barely exists.
The English make virtually nothing anymore, everything is imported. Its high streets are a grim, repetitive reel of the same chain stores and service industries.
Jake Livermore is a player I would describe as “alright.” Better than adequate. Not awful.
Jake’s transfer fee to Hull City is thought to be in the region of £6.5m. The last photo I saw of him was in a local paper, driving a Bentley the size of a detached bungalow.
My dull conclusion won’t surprise anyone. The money has been the downfall.
I read the other day that World Cup host nations never make any money. Sure canny individuals and some businesses do, but like the 2012 Olympics in London; the whole thing is mostly a sham. No good permeates deeply.
In a World Cup all the filthy cash goes to FIFA, who pay no tax, who give nothing for free.
Apparently, the Germans came closet, nearly breaking even in 2006, but an exodus of German nationals, who went abroad in an effort to swerve the tournament, caused a negative impact on the economy.
The corruption of FIFA is frequently cited in all of this mess, as if it were somehow a rogue state. But it is time for football fans to look at the game, as parents look at the organised religions that inflict harm upon their children.
Sepp is the Pope of football, those doing his will locally to you; his molesting priests.
Instead of unthinking belief and subservience contrived upon ancient fairy tales, the papal whores in the FA use money as their means to achieve total control.
This cycle needs to be broken, or “the future” of the English game internationally, is simple. It doesn’t have one.
Fund education properly so schools aren’t tempted to sell off their football pitches. Do what the Germans do and build communal sports facilities in public places.
If you give kids great things, you’ll be amazed how responsive they can be. Some of them will even stop Facebooking and stabbing.
How do you fund all this?
Heh, the cynic in me says make the service industries that depressingly infest our high streets pay their taxes. If they are defying the tax laws, then change the laws.
But the more obvious answer perhaps, is to capture a significant element of the revenues pumped into football from Sky. No footballer needs or indeed is worth the insane class of money that is being swilled around the modern game.
If players want to flee the Premier League in response, good luck to them.
If it means “the ordinary man in the street” can be priced back into football, who knows what might happen, people might become a little more inclined to cheer.
