They hired an Italian manager to run the national team and now the FA wants to scour the world for ideas to revive the English game. The FA revealed yesterday what it called its Vision for the next four years, a wish list of objectives designed to put an England team into a World Cup final and reverse the flood of foreign players swamping the national game.

The Vision set Fabio Capello, the England manager, his first target, although it appeared to be one born of English reserve rather than a call to arms. The FA's demand was that England's senior team qualified for all leading competitions, reaching semifinals at least by 2012. Which appeared to bypass the 2010 World Cup finals and not exactly demand winning the highest prize for a nation without a World Cup triumph in 42 years.

Capello was not fazed and outlined his objective, which was to win every match. “It is no problem and no surprise that a target has been set,” he said. “We should all be confident about it because the team I have at the moment is capable of meeting the objectives.”

Whether Capello will meet his objective with the help of a new performance director remains to be seen. Just as the FA was forced to bring in a foreign coach, so it wants to reach out to the rest of the world for the ideas that have, it believes, helped to propel foreign teams ahead of England, despite the nation's dominance at club level. The performance director would be given the authority to examine best practice in football around the globe, as well as other sports, to discover whether they can be translated on to English football pitches.

Who will fulfil the role is a mystery, though, possibly even to Lord Triesman, the FA chairman, and Brian Barwick, the chief executive. Triesman wants an Englishman, but even he must be daunted by the prospect of a trawl through English football's bare crop of talent when there are so few with the authority and credentials the job would appear to demand.

Capello at least believes that a performance director could bring fresh thinking to a moribund game. “If you think you know everything, you are not going to go far,” he said. “You need somebody going around the world to go and get the best from not just football, but other sports, and to bring it back.”

The England manager will be working from a permanent base as the FA wants to press ahead with its much-delayed National Football Centre in Burton upon Trent, in Staffordshire. In mothballs for almost seven years, the Burton site is set to become England's training headquarters, as well as a centre of excellence that could produce a new generation of highly qualified coaches and medical staff, while the best young players could be nurtured alongside the full England squad.

The FA has spent £25million at Burton and Barwick believes that costs will escalate by at least a further £20million. But Capello feels that it will be money well spent because it will provide a spiritual and practical home for the England team, words that will have been music to the ears of Barwick, who has spent most of his almost four years in office grappling with criticism of Burton - 130 miles from Wembley in the Midlands - as the wrong location for an England football headquarters.

But nowhere in the Vision is a specific plan to stem the tide of foreigners swamping the English game. Triesman acknowledged that there is little the FA can do to tackle the issue raised by Kevin Keegan that haunts the English game: the concentration of success in four clubs bolstered by big-money signings from abroad. The Newcastle manager's concerns were reflected by Triesman, but the FA chairman held out little hope that he or Fifa, the sport's world governing body, could convince Europe's politicians to change employment law to allow quotas on foreign imports.

The answer, instead, Triesman said, is to produce a new generation of great players. The FA Vision is of a successful England team working out of a glamorous new headquarters in Burton, at the apex of an English game played by millions more youngsters, guided by a new regime of highly qualified coaches and referees. Those youngsters should then, he said, be capable of breaking through to the Barclays Premier League and England team. The players may not be around now, but if the FA Vision is successful, they will be.

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