got way too much time on his hand but i'm just gonna crib the post since the site is migrating to a new forum. it doesn't say a lot that we don't already know, but it's nice to have the numbers behind it.

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I read the article in The Sun's by Paul Jigging earlier and being a football nerd I wanted to do my own research to look at the issue at hand.

I've looked at players aged 21 or younger (as of today) who have recorded 1min or more in their domestic league and listed their nationality (including dual nationalities).


https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30654692/cafsoccer/nationality_chart.jpg

I've now looked to see how many minutes the players are getting and averaged it out as a percentage.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30654692/cafsoccer/playing_chart.jpg

So on average, an English U21 player is playing 14% of the Premier League. While a German U21 player is playing 19.4% of the Bundesliga. Worrying times for English football and highlights the real issues we face. Not only are we producing less players, but we're also playing them less often. We are last in every category. Also for a league famed for our pace and energy, we actually play the least amount of kids (joint with Spain).

If you combine all 5 leagues together you can look at the bigger picture.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30654692/cafsoccer/nationality_total_chart.jpg

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What I also found interesting is that almost 50% of the players in the Premier League are foreign. Only Serie A has worst stats, but they play more youngsters and thus still have more Italians coming through.

I've been wanting to make a thread based on this ever since I noticed the issue through Soccermanager months ago. But wanted to wait till the season was through before posting a review.