Britain, Britain, Britain! Land of technological achievement! We’ve had running water for over ten years, an underground tunnel that links us to Peru, and we invented the cat!
--Tom Baker, Little Britain
The United Kingdom. The home of football. Of World Cup winners, Wembley and Wazza, of... er, Wales and Wimbledon. They’ve given the sport so much, all around the world - not least in Australia.
Steve McMahon. Steve McMahon Junior. Terry Butcher. Brian Deane. Ian Ferguson as a player. Ian Ferguson as a coach. Several geriatrics who passed through the New Zealand Knights changing rooms over the course of two years. All legends in their own right who helped usher Australian football into a new era - of mediocrity.
English football is dead. Gone. Expired. Pushing up the daisies. Shuffled off this mortal coil. It is an ex-style of football! Look at the World Cup; a draw with the USA, rubbish results against Slovenia and Algeria, and an over-reliance on a man who looks like a small ogre being able to magically blast games open with his skill and grace. They haven’t won a World Cup since 1966, and they don’t look like doing so again any time soon.
At some point, every A-League franchise has felt the need to recruit from England and/or the UK. They’ve done so with mixed results - Andy Todd can certainly be termed a successful buy, but one doubts if people feel the same way about Ronnie Bull, Guy Bates, or “McJu”.
What’s more, their coaches are rubbish. England at the moment is bleating for an English coach to take over their national team. You know why you got Capello, people? Because Steve McLaren just worked so damn well. McMahon. Butcher. Ferguson. Mitchell. McKinna. Their success rates vary, but their style of football is all the same - rubbish.
Hell, I went to Old Trafford on the weekend to catch the United v Wolves game - and that was rubbish. Their coaches? Some no-name Scotsman called Ferguson and an Irishman (who until recent history would have been considered part of the UK anyway). As for the game - you guessed it, it was rubbish. Quite similar in style to some of the stuff we see in the A-League, and not at all like the Bundesliga match I’d watched the weekend previous.
Strength In Numbers
So - the British are crap. But how bad is it over here, you might ask? Are we really being that swamped with so many bad footballers that we need a Pauline Hanson to form a new party? Well, that depends where you reside. The table that follows illustrates the percentage of foreign players in an A-League franchise’s history that have come from England:
What do we see here? Well, I see that the three most mediocre records in A-League history are stapled to the top of this chart. Those three franchises have many embarrassing results and just the one solitary finals appearance between them. Moving on, we can also see that the teams who have actually won the title - Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne - have a fraction of the English representation of the teams above them. Then there’s Brisbane Roar, THE BEST FOOTBALL TEAM EVER TO HAVE PLAYED IN AUSTRALIA, who have THE MOST VISIONARY COACH THIS COUNTRY HAS EVER SEEN, sitting right at the bottom of the list with no English players. Clearly, importing Englishmen only leads to mediocrity - and if any A-League team is serious about improving, they can stop looking to the United Kingdom.
The UK, you say? But you’ve just been talking about England, old bean! Ah, but take a look at this next table:
This shows combined foreign players from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland as a percentage of all foreign imports. North Queensland Fury, as we can see, are as one-dimensional as they come. One in every two Fury imports is from the UK - pretty staggering actually, especially when you consider that the Townsville climate is more like Asia than Accrington.
Again, our perennial whipping boys New Zealand Knights feature prominently, and once more my own football club is just one percentage point behind. Clearly, we’re hanging out with the cool kids here. Interestingly, Central Coast can actually claim to have won something, despite having 45% of their imports come from the UK. Uninterestingly, they have been branded one of the most “unwatchable” teams in the A-League. Once again, Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane - teams either successful or entertaining - are well down the list. Wellington too have learnt their lesson - no more poms for us bro!
So, the message here for Perth Glory is simple. Your over-dependence on the English and Scottish has cost you dearly. The continual hiring of UK coaches and players, despite their failures for you in the past, is absolutely abhorrent. The truth is right here in front of us, in black and white - to succeed at football in this country, you need to throw off the yoke of our colonial oppressors. A failure to do so is a surefire recipe for disaster. Tony Sage, heed this warning!
A Little Note From The Author
So, you may have gathered by now that I’ve hammed this up a bit. Unfortunately, the miscalibrated sarcasm detectors of some readers and commentators requires this little note at the end. This article is first and foremost a lampooning of the idea that one nationality is worse than another, or that by employing people from a certain region of the world you’ll have any better or worse chance of winning silverware.
At the end of the day, players should be judged on merit, not nationality or race. If you think Englishmen suck at football, try telling that to Andy Todd while running past him into the penalty area. Conversely, try speaking to Adrian Trinidad about how South Americans can sweep all before them on the football pitch, dominating the world in a wave of style and sheer brilliance...
However - that’s not to say the statistics presented above are completely meaningless. They do hint at a few home truths some in the A-League would prefer to remain hidden. The first of these is that when clubs don’t know what they’re doing with regards to player recruitment, they fall back on Mother England. It’s an easy option - plenty of Aussie players and coaches spent some time there, and as a current resident I can say that there’s plenty of football for them to chew on.
Unfortunately, that brings us to the second home truth. The teams that have the highest proportion of English, Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish players tend to be those who have been the most unsuccessful in the A-League. The teams that are more successful tend to have higher concentrations of Brazilians and Dutchmen, or a wide variety of nationalities dotting their transfer histories. If people are interested in just how much variety, I can bring up those stats in a later article.
Finally, the home truth that is most difficult for a Sandgroper to swallow - our own club, Perth Glory FC, is one of these English/UK-dominated teams. Now, you may argue we’ve got a UK-based populace here, but that doesn’t explain the past popularity of players like Ivan Ergic, “Gumpy”, or Edgar Junior. Nor can you argue with the fact that we’ve won just as much in the A-League as the Fury or Knights, and that even fellow UK-ites Central Coast continue to give us a good walloping on the pitch.
The fact is, our problems go further than that. It’s not just that Perth players are historically recruited in an Anglo-centric manner, it’s that the people coaching and working at the club are also looking through Anglo-centric eyes. Again, people like Bobby Robson, Steve McLaren (at club level) and Brian Clough show that the English can coach - but people like Butchers, McMahons, and Fergusons also show how inept and one-dimensional they and their playing style can be; and unfortunately, there are no ‘Cloughies’ on the Glory payroll last time I checked.
To be British and associated with football is not a crime. But to be continually fixated on a certain blinkered mindset - at both a team and a club management level - is. When you think Perth’s most loved NSL manager was a German who has coached in Germany, Cyprus, Ukraine, Oman, Iraq, and Belarus, and then realise that our last two managers were born in the same freakin’ town in Scotland, it goes some way to explaining why Glory’s season is going down the bloody toilet.
And with that, I’ll leave the last word to Mr Baker:
“Here are some facts about Britain that you might not know. Number one - Britain is a country. Number Two - Britain is called Britain. Number five - BRITAIN!”
