Foreign Player Quota for UEFA Competitions? Yes, please.

As Sepp Blatter ponders over a possible player quota to be imposed on teams playing in the Champions League, I'm starting to have some thoughts of my own on the matter.

Before that, I would like to congratulate Manchester United for winning the 2008 UEFA Champions League with six English players in the starting lineup for the final, and Chelsea, for starting with four. Both teams had no English players on the bench. It was a true, honest victory for English football in Moscow.

It was certainly a step up from last year when Liverpool started three, with Peter Crouch the lone Englishman on the bench, as opposed to AC Milan, who fielded only four foreign players, with another four on the bench, though it was an improvement from the same tie in 2005, when Milan started only four Italians and Liverpool only two Englishmen.

The 2006 Champions League Final between Barcelona and Arsenal was bad, because I didn't know who the players were playing for. Only a disappointing 5 out of the 22 starting the game were from their respective club's countries.

I feel that it is the duty of the clubs and football associations to ensure that their respective national teams have ample supply of quality players. The English Premier League may have the best league in the world at the moment, but the England national team is doing badly because of the lack of quota and restrictions on foreign players in the league.

The English Premier League places no quota over the number of foreign players, and this ruling has been used to the greatest effect by Gianluca Vialli's 'Italian' Chelsea and Arsene Wenger's 'French' Arsenal in the late 1990s.

Wenger continues to employ a fully-foreign lineup for majority of his campaign, and it is he and his young team who would be hurt most if the quota is imposed. Of all the players that Arsenal are linked to this summer, none of them are English.

Having said that, I really salute Fabio Capello for looking across the Premier League for players to call up to the England team instead of just focusing on these four clubs who have been playing in the Champions League for the past few seasons.

The Premier League, undoubtedly, has the most excellent marketing strategies for a football league, but in their search for more consumers they completely ignore the need to help in the development in their own national team.

If the English FA wants to have a successful national team, then they really need to start looking into Blatter's quota idea.

Italy is a prime example of how well the quota has worked for them. The Serie A is often looked down upon by the EPL fans, simply because they do not play the exciting football they want to watch, but the Italians' style of play and the quota imposed on foreign players meant that there were more opportunities available for the Italians.

In the Italian National Under-21 side, ALL of the players are regulars in the Serie A/B clubs they play in. They are exposed to the highest possible level of football at such a young age, which is difficult for the Big Four to do because they have so many better foreign players they need to satisfy. Future stars on the level of their seniors Daniele De Rossi, Andrea Pirlo and Alex Del Piero, are aplenty in this Under-21 side.

Both England and Italy are doing well in the 2009 UEFA European Under-21 Football Championship qualifiers, but the only English U-21 players who have been performing well are Gabriel Agbonlahor, Theo Walcott and Tom Huddlestone. Agbonlahor and Huddlestone are players of potential and they need to be at bigger clubs than they already are. Walcott simply isn't going to do well in an Arsenal side where he is a second string player due to his manager's preference for foreign players. England is currently leading their qualifying group now, and just imagine the immense potential of a group of players who do well on the youth international level, who could bring a whole new dimension to the club's style of play, but they are being deprived of their chances by the influx of foreign players.

Compare this to the Italians, they too, are leading their group, but they have already established youngsters like Giuseppe Rossi (Villareal), Sebastiano Giovinco (Empoli/Juventus), Robert Acquafresca (Cagliari), Arturo Lupoli (Treviso/Fiorentina) and Andrea Russotto (Treviso), Pablo Daniel Osvaldo (Fiorentina), Michele Paolucci (Atalanta), Domenico Criscito (Genoa/Juventus), Lorenzo De Silvestri (Lazio) and the list could go. All these players are major performers for club and country.

It is no wonder, at the present moment, the Italians on the international stage are a force to be reckoned with, on both the senior and youth levels.

To begin with, England has never been a force to reckon with in world football. They also need very much to kick the 'superior' mentality and start focusing on the football they play. England could really pick up a few pointers from their Italian friends, even more so now that their coach is an Italian himself, who has won the league title with every team he has coached. Five times with Milan, once with Roma, twice with Real Madrid and twice with Juventus (though these were later erased due to the Calciopoli scandal). Capello was also at the helm of an underdog Milan side which beat Johan Cruijff and Romario's Barcelona 4-0 in the 1994 UEFA Champions League Final.

Speaking of a much older final, past UEFA regulations only allowed a maximum of three non-nationals to be fielded in Champions League games. However this rule seemingly disappeared in 1998, when Real Madrid fielded only four Spanish players in their 1-0 win over then-defending champions Juventus in the final.

But well, having said so much, I should always remember the initial objective of the Premier League was to encourage investment from sponsors, and generate revenue for the owners and clubs. Money, money, money.