FA chairman Greg Dyke has proposed a fairly radical new plan to revitalise the English national team.
Dyke has been in charge of looking at the state of the national game in England and has come up with a few proposals. The most controversial proposal would be establishing a new League Three in 2016-17 made up of 10 Premier League B teams and 10 from the Conference (pic below). Of the B team squad, it is proposed that 19 of the 25 should be under the age of 21, 20 of the 25 should be home-grown and there would be no non-EU players allowed.
Promotion and relegation would apply but only as far as League One. No Premier League B team would be allowed to advance further than League One. It’s certainly an interesting proposal from Dyke and one which is sure to divide opinion. His argument is based on the decreasing number of English players playing in the top flight and particularly at the top clubs. There are currently 66 English players playing in the Premier League and he would like that to have increased to 90 by the year 2022.
Dyke said: “This decline is a problem in countries right across Europe but is a significantly bigger problem in England than anywhere else and if the trend continues we fear for the future of the English team. If this cannot be reversed, a future England manager will have fewer and fewer top level English players from which to choose.”
With B teams, 18-21 year-olds in Spain play typically 2.6 times more first team football than their English counterparts each season. Of the current Spanish national squad, only four players didn’t spend at least a season in a B or C team. Both Xavi and Iniesta (pic above), for instance, played a lot of B team football before making their bow in the Barcelona first team.
Now that you mention it, we wouldn’t mind seeing a match between Salisbury City and Manchester City B. That’s a tale of two cities if ever there was one.
