[TheBillster]

First off, I don’t think that restrictions for foreign players would help or work in a proper way.
But things aren’t that simple with just saying ‘play the best guy’. Cause who says who is really the best guy? Of course, the Coach does. But for example the pressure of producing wins with his team is leading sometimes to decisions which are hardly to recapitulate for the average fan.
I could tell you countless names of young and promising players in Germany who never ever where able to play up to their potential cause they were benched too long mostly in benefit for more experienced older foreign players. And in Soccer psychology is very important. If you don’t give a young guy the feeling that he is good enough to play for some years in the end the player will think exactly the same and his career is over before it really begins. Nowadays Europe is in big panic because the talents were and are lacking and every young guy who can half ways walk without problems is thrown into the fire calles Soccer player career. And suddenly it looks like we have millions of young talents in Europe. But that isn’t true. Millions of talents in South America might be true, but not in Europe.
The coaching, training and schooling of young talents needs to get better in Europe. Then the entire continent will have much more skilled Soccer players and wont need that much input from other areas of the world. For example until 5-6 years ago coaches for kids in Germany thought that the most important asset to teach to the young folks playing Soccer would be strength and stamina. I am glad that changed now. But Europe still needs much better own Soccer players. Soccer is so popular in Europe, it needs more world-class players coming out if Europe.

One other story I want to mention here is about the German Bundesliga, which is the most popular Soccer league worldwide based on attendance to matches if I am not wrong. The average attendance is almost 50 thousands fans per match and is still on the raise since the new millennium. One of the reasons this happens is that the German clubs started again to build their teams more around German elite players with young Germans. This is a completely new dimension of loyalty and identification with the league clubs. The attendance had a jump from 20 thousands visitors to almost 50 thousands in about just 10 years. How was that possible? It was possible cause the teams of the Bundesliga realized that their supporters want authentic teams with authentic faces to which they can easily develop a feeling of identification. Really crazy. The league has trouble to keep up with the English, Spanish and Italian league in European competitions but the league is more popular then ever before. It is so popular because the people like the character of the league with an extremely high identification level.
Once I have heard a sentence from German coaching legend Otto Rehhagel who won EURO 2004 with Greece. He said that the best players in the world will always be adored. But they will never be loved. The people will love the players which they can identify themselves the most with. I really liked this statement of him.

For example here in Germany the respect for ManU is amazing. Clubs like Chelsea almost get no respect cause people don’t buy it that they are a real team. They appear like a bunch of individualists who were forced to play together.
ManU is a team that really is loved in Germany. It is an impressive story starting over 15 years ago I assume as Sir Alex Ferguson took over the not very popular club and made it a European elite team. Even I can remember some things of the early period where young guys like David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Roy Keane, Phil and Gary Neville came up from nowhere and dominated the Premier League and Europe without problems. That is something people respect and love here. But if you say for example Chelsea everyone is saying ‘yeah Chelsky Gazprom is really cool’ and crap like that. They get no respect despite of winning some titles. But Soccer isnt just collecting titles...

Well, I think identification is really extremely important in sports and particularly in Soccer. It gets you respect. These are just some random thoughts around this topic. Maybe I will add some more later on.