Joey Barton: Football culture is rotten

The former QPR midfielder, speaking in the wake of England Under-21s group stage exit from the European Championship, said the national team was destined to fail at major championships.

"Everybody wants to blame it on something and it's not a case of that," he said on BBC Radio 5 Live. "It's not the players, it's not the coaching staff, it's not one thing, it's an accumulation of many things.

"The culture within English football is not changing - no St George's Park, no massive spend, no change of coach, this isn't going to change it.

"The culture is rotten from top to bottom. England's national team will under-perform at every single tournament because of this reason and that filters down."

Barton also claimed England players should be unavailable for selection for the senior team for a number of years if they turned down the chance to play for the Under-21s.

"The FA should say to them 'if you don't make yourself eligible for an Under-21 campaign if you're selected, you won't be considered by the national team for however many years'," he said.

He added: "We need to get in line, we need to get a passion restored in the badge of representing your country at any level."

Joey Barton is obviously correct that England's relative lack of success in international football is a complex issue but his use of damning, sweeping language aimed at his peers is unhelpful. The fact is that a variety of cultural reasons mean too few people play sport at a young age to realistically produce the level of players fans demand.

There is an arrogance from some that England should produce better footballers than we do and, on occasion, the fact they are paid such large amounts of money is used as an excuse to attack their committment when they are not as good as we hoped.

Yes, there may be players who lack passion because of their lifestyle but there are plenty of others who don't. The truth is you get the football team you deserve and until we learn to enjoy the sport again and not just demand wins, to support and encourage young talent, England won't improve.