English talent gets left behind as Premier League keeps importing

The conversation taking place in a cramped corridor at the Stadium of  Light had turned to the lack of English players on view on Saturday afternoon. Martin Jol barely paused for thought before answering a perennially vexed question. 'It's a problem,' said Fulham's manager. There were only four in the starting XIs as Sunderland were beaten 1-0 by Jol's side - Jack Colback and Adam Johnson for Sunderland and Kieran Richardson and Steve Sidwell for Fulham - but Jol's shrug was one of resignation rather than indifference. "That's typical for the Premier League,' said the Dutchman, at the end of a day which helped mark a record low in terms of the number of English players starting top-flight games on the season's opening weekend.

Rewind to the first day of the inaugural Premier League season in August 1992 and 177 players – or 73.1% – featuring in first XIs held English nationality. The weekend just gone has seen that figure plummet to 75, or 34.1%. The decrease has left the Premier League in a position where it fields significantly fewer indigenous players than Spain's La Liga, Germany Bundesliga, Italy's Serie A or France's Ligue Oneother major leagues around Europe.

Since Coventry in 1992 has a Premier League side kicked off a campaign with an all-English XI but things have reached the point where, of the 61 signings who have cost the elite division's 20 clubs a transfer fee this summer, only 12 have involved Englishmen. The reasons for this growing disconnect are myriad and complex but the situation is exacerbated by the reality that those English players who do smash through our game's "glass ceiling" command radically inflated transfer fees.

Gary Neville, the former Manchester United and England right-back, has acknowledged that, were he starting his career today, he would probably have found himself crowded out of the Old Trafford first-team picture by overseas imports. In an ideal world Neville would like to see positive discrimination for British talent in the form of a quota system.

'Seven or eight years ago at Tottenham I had Michael Dawson, Jermaine Jenas, Aaron Lennon, Tom Huddlestone, all English guys,' Jol said. "But it is impossible to do that nowadays because they are so expensive.'

This idea of potentially good English players becoming lost in the system during an era of foreign managers and reduced domestic scouting networks is something that particularly concerns Alan Pardew. "We all have to abide by rules but the rules aren't fixed so that we have to play English players," said Newcastle United's manager, who could field virtually a complete team of high-quality French players sourced at comparative bargain prices.