The FA chairman is keen to tackle the crisis which could harm the national side's chances of reaching the World Cup finals and to rebalance the priorities within the English game
Greg Dyke's cri de coeur on the looming, and long predicted, crisis facing the English national side could not have been better timed.
Roy Hodgson's England are facing a make-or-break pair of back-to-back qualifiers in the midst of an injury crisis that has exposed the paucity of options in key positions.
The Premier League season that has just kicked off amid much hype and a record £5.5bn TV deal did so with a Guardian study showing that the proportion of English players in top-flight starting XIs had sunk to an all-time low of just over a third.
And the transfer window that has just closed amid unprecedented hoopla was dominated by the tussle for overseas talent, with barely an English player mentioned in dispatches due to a combination of the lack of homegrown talent available and the better value on offer overseas.
As endlessly rehearsed since 1992, the ultimate irony is that one of the original stated aims of the formation of the Premier League – and the reason a supine Football Association approved its formation – was to help the national side. That never happened and ever since there has been an air of barely disguised tension between the all-powerful, ever-richer club game and the national side ever since – periodically surfacing in rows over player availability, a winter break and overall priorities.
However, just as the talent pool reaches its shallowest point, the FA and the Premier League are also right to point to signs of progress, arguing that the overdue combination of an integrated plan for youth development and the opening of a national football centre at St George's Park a mere 37 years after it was first mooted will bear fruit.
The problem is, it will be more than a decade before we can judge whether those overdue remedial measures have worked – and whether English football's dysfunctional family stopped bickering in time to prevent us passing the point of no return. They have, at least, stopped arguing over who does what, laying down arms two or three years ago and promising to co-operate on the Elite Player Performance Plan overseen by Ged Roddy. The FA ceded control for developing elite young players to the clubs, promising instead to concentrate on "coaching the coaches" and the grassroots game.
The £340m EPPP involves overhauling the academy system so that the biggest clubs can take players from anywhere and hothousing them to give them the kind of technical footballing education that will theoretically help them rival players from overseas. Another key component is attempting to give young footballers a more rounded education that will prepare them physically and mentally for a career in professional sport.
Whether under-pressure overseas managers, working for under-pressure foreign owners, will feel any more inclined to give youth its head is another matter entirely. Meanwhile, Football League clubs still feel bruised by the entire process, despite the Premier League's insistence that in the long term they will be better off under the revised compensation terms.
Richard Scudamore, the Premier League chief executive, works under the theory that the cream will rise to the top and that if enough good English players can be nurtured, they will get their chance. He insists that club owners would rather create their own talent than buy it in, despite all evidence to the contrary.
While it is true that Chelsea and Manchester City have invested heavily in youth facilities as well as highly-paid overseas stars, there is precious little evidence yet of them bringing players through into the first team – and Roman Abramovich is now more than a decade into his billion-pound Stamford Bridge experiment.
"They absolutely buy into the system. I don't speak to a single club owner who wouldn't rather make a player locally than buy," insisted Scudamore in an interview with the Guardian on the eve of the season.
"The Jamie Carraghers and Steven Gerrards, if they [Liverpool] could replace them with players with accents like theirs they would be happy to do it," he said. "It would be disingenuous to say there was a club owner whose first priority was the England team. But I genuinely believe they are committed to homegrown talent." To which one can only look to the record sums spent in the transfer window, powered by the billions flowing in from the Premier League's new TV deal, and shrug.
Where Scudamore has a point is in his frustration with those who see the Premier League as the only cause of England's under-performance at national level. With the odd exception (1990, 1996, 2004) the national side has consistently underperformed since 1966. The 1970s, well before the Premier League was a glint in David Dein's eye, marked a particular nadir in qualification terms.
But when a string of recently retired former players, from the new England Under-21 coach Gareth Southgate to the assistant England manager Gary Neville, are warning that things are reaching a crisis point, you can only listen to them.
Anyone with eyes can see that Hodgson has fewer players with less top-flight experience from which to choose than ever before. Even in traditionally strong positions, for example in goal and in central defence, he faces a paucity of options.
Scudamore's intense focus on what is best for the Premier League has powered its huge commercial success, but it can also make him blinkered in prescribing the right treatment for the wider game. To suggest the Premier League era has not exacerbated already existing issues is simply perverse.
Where he does have a point is in his withering dismissal of the culture of failure at the FA. There can sometimes be a tendency to look for excuses before solutions and Dyke will help here. His "One BBC" campaign while he was director general rallied a fractious and unmotivated workforce behind a common cause.
Nor is the situation much better at the lower-age levels. While Hodgson has passionately argued that their performances were not as bad as billed, the Under-21 Championships in Israel were something of a low point.
They also highlighted a perennial problem. For all the rhetoric of the last four years about creating a unified culture, from the youngest development teams to the senior side, when it comes to the crunch the message is muddled. That was certainly the case in the summer when players were taken to Brazil to play in a friendly who could have appeared for the Under-21s.
This was something Dyke recognised very early on: "It needs to be more joined up, the FA and football structure, than it is now – right the way from young kids through. We need to make it very clear which tournaments we are going to take very seriously. In the summer I didn't think we made that clear and I think that was a mistake."
David Sheepshanks, the man who finally forced through St George's Park, and Dan Ashworth, the capable FA director of elite development plucked from West Bromwich Albion to give the national sides a common identity and more of a club culture, have targeted the 2020s as a reasonable target to win a major trophy. But while promising jam tomorrow is all very well, it is so wearily familiar to the public that they have almost stopped listening. Some worry about the relevance of international football to today's players and fans if the current trajectory continues, although still healthy attendances at Wembley and the audience figures for ITV tell another story.
Dyke, who has spent his first weeks in the job canvassing opinion from a range of figures within the game, has given himself four years to make a difference. He is wise not to pick a public fight with the Premier League in his first weeks in the job. David Triesman, one of his predecessors, tried that and signed his own death warrant in the process. But he is equally keen to emphasise that he will not be pushed around.
It will be his ability to walk that tightrope and get the Premier League clubs to sign up to specific, practical proposals that can help England in the short term that will speak louder than any words, however persuasive. In the meantime, he must also inspire the belated progress of a longer-term overhaul of the culture of the game – and a rebalancing of the priorities of the national side and the national league – to go further and faster. "I like challenges," Dyke said recently. "I'm not very good at things I think I could do easily." Good job.
The FA
England
Greg Dyke
Roy Hodgson
World Cup 2014 qualifiers
Premier League
Owen Gibson
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