The other issue is that if we believe having too many foreign players in your domestic leagues hurts your national team, how does one explain England? The Premier League has the second highest percentage of foreign players, and yet, in the past three major tournaments, this England team has been as strong as any in the 150-year history of the FA. Oh, and they’re pretty darn good at youth level too, having won a gaggle of trophies in recent years: the U17 World Cup in 2017, the U19 Euros in 2022, the U20 World Cup in 2017 and the U21 Euros this past summer. Sure, they’ve upgraded facilities and spend a ton on youth development relative to developing nations, but then so do Germany and Italy.
Could it be that competing for playing time actually makes players better? And being exposed to senior pros from every corner of the globe gives players a better-rounded understanding of the modern game, while helping them grow? I think we know the answer to that.
The unsexy truth is that generations of talent come in cycles, that nature is as big a part as nurture. You can — and should — build a fancy, high-end pipeline and you should make it as big as you can to ensure you don’t miss out on the Mbappes and Haalands of the future, but there’s no guarantee that an Mbappe or a Haaland will flow through it. There’s an element of randomness to world-class talent that no amount of coaching and infrastructure can conjure up out of thin air.
Does that mean world-class players are born and not made? Not quite, because you still need to spot the talent (hence the size of the pipeline) and create an environment where they can develop, and if that underlying talent (not just physical, but mental too) isn’t there, there’s only so much you can do.
Consider Barcelona‘s vaunted academy, La Masia. We all swooned at the team that contained Lionel Messi, Xavi, Andres Iniesta, Sergio Busquets and the other homegrown youngsters that went on to set Europe alight. But if La Masia really was the secret ingredient, how is it possible that in the 11 years between Busquets’ debut in 2008 and Ansu Fati‘s debut in 2019, their most gifted academy graduate who actually had an impact on the first team was — with all due respect — Sergi Roberto?
Or cast your mind back to Iceland.
In 2016 they reached the quarterfinals of the Euros, beating Roy Hodgson’s England along the way. Two years later they qualified for the World Cup. Documentaries and case studies were made extolling the genius of a tiny nation of 380,000 capable of reaching such heights. Commentators extolled the brilliance of the Icelandic FA in building all-weather pitches all over the island and adopting the most progressive coaching techniques.
Well, they haven’t qualified for anything since 2018, and likely won’t for the foreseeable future, considering they’re second-bottom of their Euro 2024 qualifying group and have already lost to the likes of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Luxembourg. Their FIFA world ranking, which stood as high as 18, is now 67, behind Cape Verde.
What happened to the all-weather pitches and the progressive coaching? Presumably they’re still there. And presumably, that’s not what made them so good, but rather the presence of players like Gylfi Sigurdsson, Aron Gunnarsson, Birkir Bjarnason and others. They’re all gone, and the guys who replaced them aren’t as good. That’s not because Iceland’s youth development now stinks, but simply because those are once-in-a-lifetime talents (by Icelandic standards) and you can’t plan on them regularly rolling off an assembly line. You simply have to be prepared when they turn up.
Germany and Italy, for a number of reasons — some common to both, some not — have had a rough ride of late. It’s worth understanding why in a rational, measured way. Ideally, without the doom-mongering and knee-jerk reactions we in the commentariat are so prone to.
