David Beckham: Don’t pick on the foreigners

November 26th, 2007 | Posted by PostmanE

David Beckham has always seemed like a pretty reasonable guy. Of everyone surrounding his incursion into Major League Soccer, Beckham’s expectations of his performance were probably the most accurate, and hey, who doesn’t love Snoop Dogg?

After a premature England departure from Euro 2008 — and by “premature,” I mean “just lost to Croatia and won’t even make Euro 2008″ — Beckham is proving that assessment correct. How? He’s refusing to place the blame for England’s poor national play on the shoulders’ of its professional league’s many foreign players:

“There’s many excuses out there that people can come up with but I don’t think you can blame it on foreign players,” Beckham told BBC London.

“For me, the foreign players have brought something special to the Premiership and our country. Hopefully I’ll still be playing, and playing well enough, to be in the England squad in 2010.

“If you look back at 1974 and 1978 when we didn’t qualify for World Cups back then there was probably 90% of English players in the English league. Now there’s probably a lot more foreign players but I don’t think you can turn round and look at it like that.”

You’d think that stance, what with its intelligent use of examples and reasoned logic, would be the default opinion among European soccer’s leaders, but that’s not exactly true. After all, even FIFA president Sepp Blatter is talking about putting a cap on foreign players in England. I’m not sure how that would make England’s players better; so a bunch of mediocre players would be playing against each other week? We have that already. It’s called the MLS, and it’s every bit as high quality as the proposed Premiership. Which is to say, not very high quality at all.

{HT: The Offside}