Why England are forever destined to fail at major tournaments

If you want to know why it was that England’s Under-21s followed the same, familiar path of an early exit from an international tournament long followed by their senior colleagues, if you want to know why the FA’s target of winning the 2022 World Cup is complete and utter fantasy hokum, if you want to know why England are forever destined to make up the numbers, on a par with Sweden, Croatia and Belgium, the answer is simple: follow the money. And where you find the money, there lies the power.

English football has never been wealthier. Compared even to the giants of the European game, Spain and Germany, its domestic league operates on a different financial level altogether. Here’s how rich our game is: when the new broadcasting deal kicks in this coming season all 20 of the Premier League club will be among the 30 richest in Europe.

This, you might have thought, would be hugely to our national side’s advantage. All those facilities, all those coaches, all that reward. Except the money in our game is all with the clubs. And where you find the money, you find the priority. There you find the power.

In the other two national team games in England, the money lies with the international side. In cricket and rugby union the clubs need a buoyant, successful England side to finance their progress. In rugby union it is the cash cow of Twickenham that lies at the heart of the game’s strength. The clubs need England to do well in order to continue to generate the income that keeps them afloat. So they are happy to structure the game to the international team’s advantage, ceding their best players to England mid-season every year for the Six Nations, happily agreeing to the scheduling of a World Cup at the start of their domestic competition, and as a result not being able to field their stars for another three months.

They give up their players not out of altruism or patriotism or in order to generate a feelgood surge around their game. They do so because they know the single most attractive product available to them is international competition. That is what the broadcasters and sponsors and punters want to pay to watch. And since they are gifted a slice of the international income, it is in the clubs’ interests to ensure it thrives. The bottom line is, they give up their players because the Rugby Football Union pays them.

The same with cricket. The counties would not survive without test match income. Here is a clue as to their financial dependency on the international game: during the last Ashes tour, Lancashire sold 80,000 pints of beer a day during the Old Trafford test. That is what you call a direct subsidy from above. As a result the counties act effectively as feeder clubs to the international side, discovering and developing talent only to surrender it to England when the ECB comes calling. Most of the test team play for their counties no more than once or twice a season.

In football, the clubs make sufficient money from their own resources that the international game is an irrelevance. Worse, it is an inconvenience. It leeches off their contracted talent. It jeopardises their progress by returning players exhausted and injured from international competition. If they were not bound by long-held FIFA agreement they would frankly rather not release anyone, anytime, never mind for second rate competition like the U21s.

Moreover, unlike rugby and cricket, which have a direct financial return from producing new young players for the international system, they have no incentive to bring on young Englishmen. Frankly there is too much effort, too much risk, too much uncertainty involved in doing that. Might as well buy new talent fully formed from wherever the best it can be found.

And for sure, with the majority of them now under foreign ownership, the clubs in the Premier League don’t even have a patriotic imperative to support the England set-up. Here is the truth: they just don’t need it.

It is no good whinging about this. No good Joey Barton suggesting the FA flex its muscles to insist clubs release players, no good the pundits complaining about youth development and giving English players a chance. It is far too late. It is gone. The FA missed the opportunity to gain a financial stake in the Premier League when it was formed nearly 25 years ago. Back then, you will not be surprised to hear, those in charge of the FA were too complacent, too short-sighted, too incompetent to embed their organisation’s self-interest in the constitutional fabric of the League. They needed, in short, to keep sight of the money. Their singular failure to do so left us where we are today.

And frankly, for growing number of fans of Premier League sides, they see no particular need to rush to support the international set-up. Many supporters of Manchester United and Liverpool have long embraced an antipathy to the England side. Now younger followers of Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham too find it a pointless distraction from the real thing: supporting their team.

Then we wonder why our national side fails to do anything other than turn up. We were doomed long ago, from the moment the FA let the money disappear from its hold. And no amount of tinkering at the margins will change that central fact.