Britain’s World Cup squad's got talent
The players attracted to these shores make British clubs the best represented among World Cup nations
Ian Hawkey, European Football correspondant
Wigan Athletic reached two new landmarks in the past seven days. A global television audience last Sunday watched the club participate in the season’s record Premier League scoreline. Naturally, that was not the milestone chairman Dave Whelan celebrated as he talked again of how far England’s most upwardly mobile club of the past 30 years has come.
“A huge number of people worldwide know who Wigan are,” beamed Whelan on the day Fifa received provisional World Cup squads from all the 32 countries at next month’s finals. “When you have six players representing you at the World Cup, it’s a fantastic tribute to our club and our town.”
That’s six players, Whelan might have added, from five nations on four continents: spin the globe, pick a line of longitude or latitude, and you’ll find a Latic. Wigan’s diverse World Cup half-dozen come from Honduras in central America; from Ivory Coast in Francophone West Africa and Ghana in Anglophone West Africa; from Serbia in the Balkans, and from South Korea. They make up about 4% of the footballers who earn their living in Britain and will spend next month in South Africa.
In Fifa headquarters in Zurich, the names of 121 players from the English Premier League, 17 from the Coca-Cola League, and 11 from the Scottish Premier League are being processed for accreditation badges, visas and tax waivers. Some will be whittled away when national coaches trim their parties, by June 1, to 23. But 2010 will mark English football’s highest representation at a World Cup, exceeding the 102 who went to Germany four years ago and the 105 — 23 of them in the Republic of Ireland squad — in Asia in 2002. Take away the England party of 23 and there may still be 100 or more footballers from the top two divisions of English football representing other countries in South Africa.
Money is the main reason. The top 40 clubs in English football pay a higher average salary than anywhere else and the best footballers now believe, as they did not at the turn of the millennium, that their professional ambitions will be served in England as well. In the past five years, English football has been represented in the final of at least one European club competition every May. Between 2001 and 2004, only Liverpool, Uefa Cup winners in 2001, from the Premier League did so.
Most of the game’s leaders regard England as the best place to work. Chelsea employ the likely captains of four serious World Cup contenders, Ivory Coast (Didier Drogba), Germany (Michael Ballack), Nigeria (Jon Obi Mikel) and Ghana (Michael Essien). Manchester United players will wear the armbands for England (Rio Ferdinand) and South Korea (Ji-Sung Park).
English scouting, once notoriously narrow in range, has also broadened. Though the tendency is still for good players from South America or Africa to reach England via continental Europe, English football has become resourceful in searching out talent in what agents call the “emerging markets” of Asia, or Central and North America. Players such as Wigan’s Hondurans, Maynor Figueroa and Hendry Thomas, came to Lancashire directly from Tegucigalpa; Wigan’s Korean, Cho Won-Hee, transferred straight from Suwon.
But for a player such as Cho, 27, the Premier League has been a mixed blessing, as taxing a challenge as it has been personally rewarding. Partly to safeguard his chances of World Cup selection, he returned to his old club, Suwon Bluewings, on loan in the new year because he had been unable to command a first-team place at Wigan.
Nor have the club’s Serbian or their Ghanaian. Vladimir Stojkovic and Richard Kingson are goalkeepers who deputise for Chris Kirkland, an Englishman not going to South Africa. Last week Ghana’s head coach worried aloud about his goalkeeping resources. “I have only one goalkeeper active abroad,” said Milovan Rajevac. “But Kingson is experienced even if he hardly plays at Wigan.”
Hardly? Kingson has not touched a ball in the Premier League this season, and made a mere four league appearances in 2008-09 and one league start for his previous club, Birmingham City, the season before. Stojkovic played four league matches for Wigan this term.
At the higher end of the scale, Premier League success means enhanced international status. It will be surprising if a Premier League footballer does not return to England with a World Cup winners’ medal in August — the last ones to do so were France’s Arsenal and Chelsea players in 1998 — and would probably require Italy to retain their title, Greece to repeat their unexpected success of the 2004 European Championship, or Uruguay to emerge a dark horses for it not to happen. Japan have a handful of their better players scattered around Europe, but none currently in England; even North Korea export, although mainly to neighbours.
The Premier League will be represented in Brazil’s squad by Tottenham goalkeeper Heurelho Gomes, and perhaps Chelsea’s Alex; in Spain’s by Liverpool’s Fernando Torres and Pepe Reina and Arsenal’s Cesc Fabregas; in Germany’s by Ballack; in France’s by Patrice Evra and a handful of footballers who call London home.
Should Argentina triumph on July 11, an unusual double could be celebrated by Jonas Gutierrez and Fabricio Coloccini, that of winners’ medals with Newcastle in the English Championship, its second tier, and the World Cup. Italy are more inward-looking, with their coach, Marcello Lippi, retaining only one exile, the striker Giuseppe Rossi, who plays in Spain for Villarreal, a club he joined from Manchester United. The best Italian footballers still tend to come to the English game before, or after, the peak years of their career.
Apart from the North Koreans, all the squads draw on players who work in the leading leagues of Europe. The German Bundesliga, traditionally a point of migration for footballers from countries of eastern Europe, has 90 would-be World Cup aspirants; Italy’s Serie A and Spain’s La Liga — popular with South Americans — 80 and 70 respectively. Fifty-three players are contracted to clubs in the French championnat, which is still the most common first landing-point in Europe for talented young Africans.
Only one country has submitted a shortlist of players with no exiles at all — England. Deprived by injury of David Beckham, of AC Milan and LA Galaxy, Fabio Capello did not so much as glance outside the Premier League for his selection of players. He, the expensively headhunted foreign manager, lives in a football culture where manpower imports vastly outnumber exports.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/premier_league/wigan/article7127803.ece