I don’t agree. I think the current England side would easily be competing for the English Premiership title - it’s essentially drawn from the best players of the top English clubs. Johnson, Ferdinand, Terry, Ashley Cole, Gerrard, Lampard, Walcott and Rooney all start for one of the traditional Big 4 English clubs, and even the ‘ringers’ are players like Barry, King, Carragher, Crouch and Joe Hart, who start for clubs challenging for the Champions League. The idea that the current England team couldn’t compete at the top of Premiership seems ridiculous to me - the players are all drawn from those same teams at the top of Premiership. It doesn’t make any sense.
I’ve never heard that conclusion in the media. Where did you hear that? It seems a pretty unanimous sentiment to me that the current Spain side is about as good as any domestic club team in the world right now.
And by the same token, if a club wanted to assemble the current Spain squad, or even the England squad, they’d have to spend hundreds of millions on them. National teams get them for free. It’s swings and roundabouts.
For me, the fact that you can’t spend your way to success is one of the joys of international football, of which the World Cup is the pinnacle. Club-level allegiances always seem kind of arbitrary to me, when you consider that they are all-star teams brought in from anywhere and everywhere. I don’t understand how people can be passionate supporters of, say, Manchester United when hardly any of the players come from anywhere near Manchester (maybe because neither do half of the supporters ;)). Whereas something like Algeria vs. Slovenia, which is in play right now - maybe it’s not going to be the highest quality football, but I totally get why people in those countries care about it, and that makes it seem more important to a neutral like me.
What the heck are you talking about? February? Do you have any cite whatsoever to back this up?
Pre Dream Team the US Olympic team was made up of college players - their tryouts for the team were in late May or early June. In February they’d be knee deep into their conference schedule.
Looking at the English premier league, England probably aren’t as good as Man Utd, Chelsea or Arsenal, but are probably stronger than Aston Villa, Tottenham and Man City. Tottenham came 4th this year, and the backbone of their team are England ‘B’ players. But a club team has the advantage of playing together every week, while international tournaments come at the end of a long domestic season, making it harder for international teams to get the best out of their players.
But whilst those teams at the top of the Premiership do field England players, they also have the ability to plug any weak spots with world-class foreigners. England doesn’t have that luxury.