Beckham going to America

With Fabio Capello given the England job, Beckham should be really regretting going to the MLS. Isn’t just baffling that David Beckham, who turned down the chance to stay at Real Madrid (and possibly win another La Liga title), play in Serie A (with Inter Milan or AC Milan and possibly win a Scudetto), Premier league and the French league. At 31, at the time, he could have played two more seasons and possibly win more trophies while at it. The baffling part is that here’s a player who claims he values playing for England, and wants to keep playing for as long as he can, while dreaming of breaking the 100 caps mark. He is by no means past his sell by date, from the few times he played for England under Mclaren abysmal reign, he was by far one of the better players on the pitch. Now with Capello in charge, wouldn’t playing top Italian league football in the Serie A have done his chances a world of good? Somehow the whole idea of winning the American public over to football seems to be one of those self-justification excuses (and the disneyfication of football is not the way to do it) – he was a marketing gimmick, to fill stadiums and earn some cash from endorsements and media appearences.  I think earning £480,000 per week, and £25.6 million a year did it. But wait, he’s opening soccer schools and helping the kids! What a dumb decision. As the novelty runs out, he’ll be forgotten — give it a season or so. At least LA Gaxy and Beckham would have made some money. Anyway, here’s a list of famous players who went stateside.

Blood and guts football

Talking about intelligent play, here’s Chelsea’s Malouda:

Training sessions are terrifying. They are maximum intensity, and you go flat out … During actual matches, it is as though everybody’s brains are switched off. People play by instinct, how they did when they first discovered football.

It’s that type of ethos, blood and guts football, that has always been one of the main features of almost all British teams. As we saw with the England games, once a team controls the game and slows it down, England chase the game, often defending for long periods or just trying to get the ball back to start another quick attack. On the other hand, the Germans do have a physical style of play, but combine it with intelligent passing and build up from the back. But don’t players from abroad also have to adapt to the premier league and perform in what can be at times ‘brain numbing’ football? Of course, but I think many of these players, especially those who play for top European national teams, have learnt their game in European leagues and developed their games through their different youth team systems. In other words, they can combine between these different styles they have learnt or adapted to and maybe even strenghten their all round game.

Players like Owen Hargreaves are a good example, I think him learning his  football in Germany and then moving to Manchester United has done him the world of good. Now if only more English players played in European leagues then it would develop the England team setup, it has done other national teams alot of good to have their players plying their trades all over Europe.  The improved Brazilian defensive displays from the 90s and onwards are examples of that.

A final point, are English players equipped to adapt to European leagues, after all players like Des Walker, Gascoigne (well, for his own reasons), Paul Ince and David Platt don’t exactly stand out, compared to Klinsman, Van-Basten or Gullit. Are English players to British-centric, is there something that makes it difficult for them to adapt to other leagues and styles of play? I really don’t know, and I don’t even think we can generalise from the examples I gave. But whether we like it or not the money in the premier League is on such a level that it can absorb most of the England players — why go abroad? The players from the 90s left England when the Premier League wasn’t exactly awash with money, so that trend stopped early on. So it is difficult to make solid observations from a few players.