 Monday, 28th Jun 2010 09:02 English football is perhaps at its lowest ebb in two decades both domestically and Internationally, football has always been a boom and bust economy and this means that quite often most people dont notice its heading for bust because its still in the boom period. In both the Premier league and England set up we need to look at the Germans. Over a decade ago the Germans, casting an eye at the way the English game was heading made big changes in the Bundesliga, the main one being the 50% plus one rule, that meant that 50% of a club plus 1 share had to be owned by the supporters and that an investor could never take full control of the club. The initial result was that teams like Bayern Munich (who incidentally all support this ruling and have backed to keep it) struggled to compete in Europe at the highest level due to not having the funding that the likes of Chelsea had, but now the fruits are starting to show. The domestic game in Germany is booming, crowds flock to the games due to competitive pricing alongside a feeling of ownership of the teams etc and this in turn has lead to investment in stadia and training facilities and although the Bundesliga was weak for a while due to a lack of quality foreign talent, this is not starting to pay dividends as a combination of improved training facilities and emerging talent that gets a chance to play in the league has lead to a healthy Bundesliga that unlike the premier is not dominated by four teams and this in turn has lead to higher standards in the players. This has now filtered down to the German national side as we saw on Sunday, it cant be said its full of stars, but its full of players who are not full of their own ego's and do play as a team. The English game would do well to look at Germany and how they have completely revived football in that Country, they were forward enough to begin its revamp in a boom period, they saw what way the game was heading and they were prepared to make some sacrifices in the short term to ensure that it thrived in the long, we of course have not done that and hence we are now dominated by multi millionaire club owners (mostly foreign) who have taken the clubs further away from the fans than at any point in history and as we have seen at Man Utd, Liverpool and of course Portsmouth have built up high levels of debt that cant be sustained. Sadly unless English football takes a long hard look at itself and makes big changes then Im afraid it is doomed, there are some who would say that several clubs are too far gone to accept this, I would say that they should be cast adrift, Germany saw that a competitive league was the only way forward and that is why they boom, for them its not all about Bayern Munich, of course German football had a different set up and they made these changes before the rot set in and we here dont have that luxury, but we can still instigate change before its too late. I have of course only touched on what they have achieved in Germany, but there is plenty of information on the internet for those that want to look further, it makes interesting reading and to be honest it makes very jealous reading as i know what path I wish the English game has taken and i know what path i wish it had took.
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