20 Years Today Since Last English 1st Eleven Premier League Line Up

John Gregory for Aston Villa.....



How times have changed for the worse. Our national team success made harder by our own youth not given a chance.

 

To flip the coin over. Are there any clubs today with no English players? None spring to mind but imagine a few of the prem teams coming close.

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/f...League-fixture.html?__twitter_impression=true

They lost the match but that's a decent side of English players, as well as the three English subs brought on. It would take something special for it to ever happen again. I would like to think if we got to the premier league we would be a mainly British team, but that would probably not be the case as with other sides promoted to there.

 

I don't remember us being the best side in the world pre-1999. We were ok at times, we failed to qualify for the World Cup quite a number of times.

Rose tinted glasses and all that.

 

All of them have English players but there’s a few named all foreign teams.

Arsenal & Chelsea definitely have.

I could be wrong but I think Newcastle also named an all foreign one when they signed a load of French players

 

The 70s.

How many "foreigners " player in the top flight?

And how poor was England in that era?

 

The did have Dodgy Don as manager come on..

 

It was poor but the England team has also been very poor in very recent times; you certainly don't have to go back to the 70's to find poor England sides.

'66 wasn't a bad year.

 

The 1970 and 1990 teams were good. After that 5-1 win in Germany I thought that team would do well but it flattered to deceive. Beckham, Gerrard,Lampard, Owen etc never really gelled.

 

Let’s just balance it a bit - England, with their league with so many foreigners in it, have just got to a World Cup Semifinal, and have backed it up by making the semi final of this new fangled nations league.

It’s also a bit of a fallacy to say it’s 20 years since an all English lineup - Middlesbrough named a side years later of, at the time, all english players.

James Morrison, born and brought up in Teesside, with English parents, product of the boro academy and England international at all age groups up to u20, later decided that he wouldn’t be good enough to play for England so declared for Scotland as he had a Scottish grandparent. At the time of the game he was still English qualified though.

Not having an all English side isn’t in itself that newsworthy though.

Due to the quirks of the country we live in, there have been relatively few all ‘english’ teams for over a century.

They did occur, but weren’t a majority. We always had Welsh, Scottish and Irish players in the English leagues and most sides, even if they had no other ‘foreigners’, had at least one or two in that category many years ago.

I think the bigger problem recently has been English players only having played in England. Apart from the very few obvious exceptions, over the last 20 or 25 years we’ve barely had a player play for England who wasn’t playing in England. All the main, competitive countries in international football have decent domestic leagues, but all have players playing ‘abroad’, often their better players too. They have a broader skill set and can play in different ways, have been coached in different ways.

The tide may be turning with some of the young players going out to Germany, this may be a good thing.