A radical idea to fix international football and why Liverpool signing isn’t pointless…
The Mailbox suggests ripping up international football and starting it again as a development tool for clubs. Also: the point of Wataru Endo; Scotland stitched up; and why the kids are alright…
Any thoughts on England? Send your mails to theeditor@football365.com.
Club England
My idea for ‘fixing’ international football is to basically make it a development league for your nation’s best young players. Currently national sides are made up of conscripts drafted in every few months for a week long training session with players they don’t usually play with. We then expect the manager to wrangle them into a coherent tactically astute team capable of beating the rest of the world with very little preparation. Its mad when you think about it.
Instead, what if the England national team were operated like a club side. You’d have to completely transform the way international football is organised, something like 8-10 global leagues divided into regions, 20 countries to a league. Each country would get 38 games a year plus you could even run region cup competitions and additional playoff type games for major tournament qualification. You could then do away with international breaks and ease the fixture congestion for club sides, those mid week cup games can go into weekend slots and everyone get slightly more rest.
Financially it makes sense as FIFA would love selling off all those TV rights regionally and each country has millions of fans available to watch and attend games. Make ‘Monday night football’ exclusively for internationals so it doesn’t interfere with club schedules and it would make plenty of money to grow. Have ¾’s of England home game at Wembley with the rest on a tour of the country so everyone gets a chance to go. You’d also be maintaining the connection with fans year round and creating something we could all collectively moan about.
The biggest change would be for the players. They’d have to essentially choose between club and international football for the length of a contract. The FA wouldn’t be able to compete directly with the big clubs on wages (and there should be regulations built in to limit what they can spend) but this would mean the team is mostly made up of high quality under 23’s players who have been developed through the England youth set up. There would also be the veteran players who have finished their last big club contract and want to keep the glory going. Just imagine for the last few years the England team was made up of Eze, Smith Rowe, Gallagher, Guehi, Ramsey etc, all playing together each week, they’d be formidable. It could also act as training for England’s best managers as they work within the same format as the club sides. You could even create a quota for majortournaments so 25% of the side has selected elite players from the club game,
In another reality Real Madrid just paid the England team £100m to sign Bellingham, Ward Prowse moved to St Georges Park in the summer to become England club captain, plus Cole Palmer signed for England at 19 and has been the breakout star of the last season playing alongside Madueke and Harvey Elliott in a fluent attack.
Dave, Manchester
The kids are alright
An interesting but out of touch email on Thursday about how professional footballers are missing out or sacrificing a “normal” young person’s life and citing a big stack of things that most young people are doing less and less. It reads like it was written by someone who was partying hard in the 90s/00s and applying their experience to modern life but the world has moved on since then.
Drug use in teens is down 54% from 2008/2009 (taken from the government statistics on treatment for substance misuse). Teen drinking is also way down on where it used to be 20 years ago – From Drinkaware: (“Since 2000, the proportion of young people who drink alcohol and report having ever been drunk has declined from approximately 60% in 2000 to 45% in 2016”) and it’s gone down to about 40% in the 2020 (I’ve cited sources at the end of the email).
What is considered “normal” teen behaviour has changed. Teens and young people are more about living what they see as a wholesome, instagrammable lifestyle, keeping control and “peak performance” (Ugh). They don’t like losing control because it’s going to be captured on camera and the evidence will persist forever.. The life a pro footballer lives is a prime aspirational version of this. They aren’t “missing out” they are being hugely rewarded for living the best example of what the youth of today want to be. The likes of Haaland will retire as billionaires in their mid 30s and won’t have perceived anything they’ve done as a “sacrifice” (also they work 4hrs a day, 5 days a week, it’s not exactly a hardship). They can and will still go out clubbing, but they won’t get wrecked like “we” used to in our misspent youth.
In summary, don’t apply our generation’s standards to the younger generations, they are a hell of a lot more sensible/square than we were.
Matt L, London
Not all bad
I totally understand Lewis from Busby Way’s point, and the life he describes does sound pretty rough, but he almost single handedly ignores all the mitigating factors:
1) Earning per week what the average person is lucky to make in a year
2) The screaming adulation of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people
3) The ability to live on in memories long after you’ve retired
4) So many follow on careers in the media spotlight, or coaching or business
5) Having absolute financial security in a way 99% of people will never have
6) Even if you’re some mallet faced defender, there will be some hot lady or dude (depending on your proclivities) who will be your partner for all of the above
7) Having the best in nutrition to perform at peak ability means you’re less likely to be obese or have heart issues etc
So sure, there are downsides, but I’d bet you £100 that 99% of Mailboxers would give up everything to have the career of a Premier League footballer. Hell, they’d take the career of someone like Mustafi!
John Matrix AFC
Scotland stitched up
Please, please, please can we have an article dedicated to Thursday night’s farcical refereeing. It was worse than Liverpool Spurs, shambolic.
We (should still) be coming 🏴
SR
Ghost story
Oh bless. Will Ford actually thinks that Garcia’s ‘ghost goal’ was a refereeing mistake. He’s probably blocked that traumatic time from his memory so, as a quick reminder…the referee has since confirmed that if he hadn’t awarded the goal he’d have sent Cech off and awarded a penalty for taking Baros out for the reckless challenge in the seconds before Luis poked the ball goalwards.
Most likely 1-0 down for 85 minutes with 10 men and a second choice keeper. At an Anfield so rocking that John Terry labelled it an unparalleled atmosphere (I’m paraphrasing, obviously).
James Outram, Wirral (fully aware that Will is enticing interaction in the slow international fortnight)
Read more: James Maddison ‘digs’ keep England on joyful path away from Golden Generation
France’s spare centre-backs
Just seen the lineups for the Scotland game.
How is it fair that the French have so many good CB’s that they can afford to give Spain two?
Please can we have one?? Saying that, Southgate would still pick Maguire over prime Desailly anyway..
Ta,
Dave (Hope the Haggis Hunters stuff the Spanish!) PVFC
Evening out
So, one of the things that always amuses me about the refereeing debate is the old cannard of “it evens out over a season”. Obviously, that’s completely wrong. Not over a season, nor over many seasons. But I’m not here for that today. I’m here for a silly theoretical thought: what if bad decisions did even themselves out, always, by (football) law.
So, after a game, all major decisions are looked at and the mistakes recorded. Incorrectly sent a Red player off in the 33rd minute. Incorrectly rules a goal to Blue as a foul in the 77th, stopping it from being scored. Calls the game a minute early in extra time with the Red team behind. Sounds a bit of clusterf*ck of a game, but there you go, sometimes that happens. It evens itself out over a season.
Because in the return fixture of Red vs Blue, on the 33rd minute the Ref stops the clock and sends off a Blue player. Nothing for it, the decisions have to even out. Off you go, sorry for the suspension. In the 77th, the Ref takes one goal off the Red team (embarrassingly reducing them to -1 against the 10 men blues) but then adds an extra minute at the end of added time to let them try and win the game.
You get the idea. Wouldn’t it be wild if we explicitly evened up calls. It’s a rolling thing. So mistakes in the second game of a season are applied next season. Relegated and promoted teams swap their balance (and if the assumption that relegated teams always get bad calls is true, that means promoted teams will get a positive handicap through their season).
It’s daft, but entertaining. There are a million holes in it, but I trust the mailbox’s rules lawyers to sort it out. And it lets refs being so consistently wrong become part of the spectacle.
Andrew M, Streatham.
Endo not pointless yet
I get why Dave Tickner has included Wataru Endo in his five pointless summer signings feature. His performances haven’t set the world alight so if we’re judging on that alone then it makes sense.
However, I wouldn’t write him off as pointless just yet. There is a comparable story from 2018 when a certain Fabinho joined the Liverpool ranks. He didn’t feature much in the early weeks because he was learning the system and the requirements of his role in it. His first start in the Premier league was against Cardiff City in late October, about 9 or 10 games into the season, and in his first few games he still looked a bit shaky. Improving game after game he soon became the stuff of legend before becoming a bit older and slower last year.
I don’t know whether Endo will follow the same trajectory, but the role is specialist and pivotal. The age profile is different, Fab was 24, Endo is 30 but he’s a grafter, is intelligent and seems to be willing to learn so if he has the quality to match then we could see him shining in the 2nd half of the season.
More importantly, as we all know, Jurgen needs to have a Japanese player in his squad in order to win a league title so pointless, schmointless!
Adam (LFC)
Staying quiet
Remember when Gareth Southgate said he was “educating” us about racism? Remember when Gary Lineker described the government’s asylum policy as reminiscent of “Germany in the 1930s”? Now, faced with events that are actually racist and very much reminiscent of Nazi Germany, they’re both oddly silent. As is most of the football community. Johnny Nic is usually more than happy to hammer out a few nicely turned phrases on (real or imagined) misogyny or (real or imagined) climate change, but presented with actual, incontestable horrors, he’s seemingly got other things to do . . . To be clear, I don’t actually think Johnny should be writing about Israel. I don’t want the Wembley arch lit up in blue and white and I wouldn’t even recommend a minute’s silence at the forthcoming internationals. I think sport and politics should be separate. Perhaps you disagree. Fair enough. But the thing is, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t speak up about LGBT rights and then go silent when the Qatar World Cup is on. You can’t kneel for Black Lives Matter then say nothing when their Chicago chapter tweets in support of Hamas. For some of us, the dangers of mixing sport and politics were always obvious. Now that this has surely become apparent to everyone, can we agree to stop the selective virtue signalling once and for all? Let football remain a leisure pursuit, a bit of fun and escapism, an oasis of normality in an increasingly terrifying world.
Matt Pitt
