Watching Spain win the U21 Euros; they must have the most sustainable success model in football. Scouting right across the country and prioritising technique in every position. Having a high number of UEFA qualified coaches must help in both respects.
Is this 'scouting right across the country' line from somewhere? Or just a softer way of saying there's not enough white kids and too many inner city kids?
I think you've taken that rather the wrong way. Undoubtedly England's team is drawn from a pretty small range which obviously in turn limits the amount of quality of players we can get. There's a lot of talent in London but its still only 8m people. The North East (which was always famously a hotbed of talent) and in particularly the Midlands (who have produced virtually no internationals of note in years) certainly haven't pulled their weight in producing quality players for a fair while - these are areas with big clubs who should have the kind of infrastructure to tap in to the millions in population being missed out on.
Is there evidence it's drawn from a small range? Especially with any context or statistics as to what a small range is by comparison to peers? Where has he read that Spain 'scout across the country' compared to England?
That was a rather pathetic attempt to play the race card. Regardless of race, a massive proportion of our players come from London, Manchester, Liverpool or South Yorkshire. Spain (possibly because they have a greater number of coaches) have a greater geographical spread. It makes sense that the more areas you have coaches in, the bigger your pool of players and the higher your chances of finding elite talent.
I mean I don't have stats to compare to but its certainly something for England to improve on to make full use of the talent pool. There's 11m people in the Midlands and no shortage of clubs there, and yet that areas produced 4 England internationals with over 10 caps this century. Out of 66 players to reach that benchmark. Given it has 6 of the countries 24 category 1 academies you'd expect more productivity than we see. Who knows, maybe with the likes of Gibbs-White, Bellingham, Rodgers across 3 of the clubs in the West Midlands they might have cracked it.
Well you've made the exact same argument before in the context of race. Could have Maddison, Grealish, Chillwell, Wilson + Alli in the next squad and Gray was in the last one. Chillwell + Alli are MK but we're only getting caught up on regions because of arbitrarily drawn lines on a map. Huge south Midlands cross over there. Obviously some clubs could do better, everyone can always do better, but I just find it hard to believe that the big clubs are just lazily ignoring whole regions that are apparently stocked full of completely untapped talent. I mean, one of the FAs big problems in building coherent teams is probably that they select from too many teams. Not exactly hard for Portugal or Holland when they can basically just pick ready made teams from the big sides who have a total monopoly.
I've done no such thing. Do you not find it odd that inner city London for example is so productive, and inner city Birmingham produces nothing? Clearly there's things that can be improved on here. Seems a strange argument to just wave it away and ignore it. Do you not at all find it odd that the North West and London produce top quality players and the best examples of Midlands talent are an uncapped 24 year old and James Maddison? It's nothing about the clubs ignoring these areas, clearly there's something fundamentally different in the grass roots in these areas that's leading to a lack of talent. England isn't in a luxury position to ignore 20% of the population and say well, we've produced Callum Wilson from it so who cares?
That wasn't aimed at you. Not really, it's a bigger place and has much bigger clubs with much bigger resources. Plus, I don't really get the argument that Birmingham produces nothing. We all know that's false.
Where did that come from and what's the exact stat? Only I can think of five off the top of my head going by birthplace: Sturridge, Richards, Vassell, Cahill, Lescott. Appreciate that they didn't all come through Midlands clubs, so perhaps the stat is differently defined.
I had a quick look through, I missed Lescott but Richards was raised in Yorkshire and the North West and Cahill Sheffield born and raised.
Heskey, Barry + Jenas. Seems weird to have Richards as North West because he was born in Birmingham but raised/developed in Yorkshire/Manchester but then to have Cahill not as Midlands even though he was raised/developed in Derbyshire and came through at Villa.
Dronfield-born, which is in Derbyshire. It's a meaningless distinction, I realise, but no moreso than the players JRSG mentioned. Not totally convinced that you can draw conclusions from a stat like that, which could quite easily just be a fluke anomaly over a 20-year period.
If we're going to get really pedantic, Barry's a southerner who only moved up to the Midlands at 16. The other two though, yeah, and now we're getting up towards the kind of numbers you'd expect.
Vardy, Maguire, Walker, DCL, Stones and Rose all from Sheffield or very nearby. Hardly any from the rest of Yorkshire. This what we mean by pockets.
Well that's because you're choosing to say Delph + Rose are from 'near Sheffield' rather than 'near Leeds'. Where you could add Lennon, Rob Green, Smith, Milner.
I once read that there are around 1,500 English coaches with either UEFA A or Pro qualifications. Spain had around 15,000. Put simply, it suggested to me that players in towns and cities across Spain had more readily accessible quality coaching than their English counterparts. More quality coaches in more towns and cities in a country = a bigger talent pool. Dani Ceballos comes from a town half the size of Scunthorpe. How many of our players do?
Of course, there are other factors to explain Spain's success such as pathways etc but I was commenting more on the coaching/talent identification.
Nick Levett used to tweet about this sometimes, when he was working at The FA. According to him, the figures were misleading because other countries - including Spain and Germany - had automatically gifted the new UEFA Licences to thousands of coaches who were in possession of older qualifications, whereas The FA only awarded them to those who actually did the new courses. Supposedly a lot of the Spanish and German coaches were effectively retired and the numbers of "active coaches" were comparable across countries. This is all on his authority so I can't be sure, but he was in a position to know.
Levett's comments in full: And he later tweeted that "Spain count every coach since 1944! Most are dead or not coaching...".
The population of Utrera is about 50,000. Jordan Pickford is from Washington, population 70,000. Luke Shaw and Declan Rice are from Kingston-upon-Thames, population 45,000. Ruben Loftus-Cheek is from Lewisham, population 60,000 (if you're taking Utrera as a province of Seville you can take Lewisham as a borough of London just the same). Adam Lallana is from St Albans, population 58,000. Danny Welbeck is from Longsight, population 15,000.