- Is it time for the media to take a more reasoned approach about Arsenal?
- At last, someone starts the serious fight against VAR
By Tony Attwood
The CIES Football Observatory has posted an analysis of over 900 football clubs across the leading leagues in the world looking at the number of players they have from their own country, and from other countries.
Helpfully for us, these are divided by country, and they set out two groups of players: those who have grown up in the association of their home club (called national players in the survey) and those players who have “played for at least three seasons between the ages of 15 and 21 in their club of employment”, who are designated club-trained nationals.
Just looking at English clubs we find that Arsenal has a higher percentage of club- trained English players than any other club in the Premier League, which speaks volumes for Arsenal’s youth recruitment and retention programme. We are of course seeing the benefit of this ourselves with really important members of the team having worked their way up from the youth teams. It is good to have it confirmed.
Arsenal are on 22.2% of its players being club-trained. Chelsea are second way behind on 17.5% Then come Newcastle United, Manchester City and Liverpool. Tottenham Hotspur as always are behind the game; they are tenth on this measure, and Brentford bottom – they have no club-trained English players.
It is obvious from these statistics that having club-trained national players is a great benefit to the clubs, because the top five clubs in the Premier League club-trained table are all clubs that are currently challenging near the top of the Premier League.
But the table also includes another measure – the percentage of national players used by a team. The top five for this measure are first, Ipswich Town. They have 73.7% of their squad as the percentage of national players used in their team.
This of course at once indicates that this measure is not at all important when it comes to success in the league. It might be something nationalistic to crow about but beyond that it doesn’t mean much.
After this we have Newcastle United on 63%, then Southampton on 58%, Everton on 5 58% also, Crystal Palace with 54.5%, AFC Bournemouth on 48.5%, followed by Fulham with 43.8%, and Leicester City 42.9%.
In short, it is having players from the country that the club plays in, who are trained by the club; that really helps clubs. The bottom seven clubs by this measure all have a very low number of English national players trained by the club. In fact for all these players the percentage of English national players trained by the club is under 10%. The clubs are Fulham Southampton, Bournemouth, Nottingham Forest, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Ipswich Town, and Brentford.
Arsenal have just over 22% of their squad trained by Arsenal who are English. At the other end Brentford have none.
So this is clearly where the emphasis should be: club-trained players who are eligible to play for England. The more of those we have the better.
But remember, these players don’t have to be English in the sense of which passport they hold. The key is “eligible to play for England”.
That of course might seem strange, but it is a funny ol game as we know.
Tony,
More home grown players to spend their careers being repeatedly scythed by players of lesser talent? Bukayo Saka comes to mind. Great kid, Englishman, London born. Targeted by opposition players and condoned by PGMOL. I’ve seen some nasty goes at Nwaneri and Lewis-Skelly now. Or perhaps one would need to be born somewhere between Liverpool and Manchester to be considered English. Or Newcastle. Perhaps a Monkeyhanger from Hartlepool would fit the bill. But not London and, of course, not an Arsenal player. Sorry all, just sick of it.
@Gooner72
I to am sick of it.