Dave Richardson, the head of the Professional Football Coaches Association, believes that the different coaching bodies should unite in continuing to improve the technical ability of young English players so that Sepp Blatter’s insistence on Barclays Premier League clubs fielding a minimum of six home-grown players becomes an irrelevance rather than an obstacle.

The youth development guru, Graham Taylor’s assistant manager at Aston Villa before joining the Premier League and helping Howard Wilkinson to devise the Charter for Quality that ushered in the academy system ten years ago, is playing an instrumental role in Grass Roots Football Live and believes that such an integration between the professionals and the amateurs can only support the work the FA is doing.

The academy system has been castigated for the lack of English players making the grade at Premier League clubs, which in turn has led to the lack of quality in depth that is affecting the national team, who will spend this summer in front of their television sets instead of trying to win the European Championship.

But Richardson argues that instead of Fifa concerning itself with artificial quotas that will invite legal battles from the European Union, the governing bodies should tighten legislation to stop clubs poaching young talent without paying sufficient compensation.

“The amount of English talent in the Premier League is a problem, but the world has changed from when the academy system emerged,” Richardson said. “There are more countries in Europe, the freedom of movement is much more open and getting from country A to country B is not a problem. No one could have envisaged the growth of the Premier League globally, so that’s had a major effect.”

The amount of international contact between clubs has opened up the floodgates for foreign players. “We used to be scouting for players in England, Scotland, Wales and both halves of Ireland,” Richardson said. “Now Liverpool’s youth team is involved in a tournament in Tennessee, there’ll be clubs going to Malaysia and Australia and they’re invited because of the way the game’s gone.

“What we must do is improve the technical ability of young players in this country so the clubs want to take them, because they are as good as players from Brazil or Argentina.”

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