Time to stop blaming the foreigners

As though we need to hear it again, BBC Sport leads today on study it commissioned into the amount of English footballers playing in the Premiership. It will inevitably be solid newspaper filler for the coming days, in place of those Euro 2008 wall charts we would be pinning up had, well, all number of things been done differently.

Many have argued England’s failure to reach Austria & Switzerland is due to this record low in domestic players, but there are certain facts that seem to be consistently omitted by those who further this point of view.

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Sweden’s footballing immigrants

Swedish football has long exported top players and managers to the rest of Europe, but there are signs that the trend is beginning to reverse.

This season Sweden’s top flight boasts more foreign players than ever before, all hoping to become stars in a new country just as the likes of Freddie Ljungberg and Zlatan Ibrahimović have across Europe.

Just one of the many foreign imports is James Keene, an English striker who was only 19 when he made the switch from Premier League Portsmouth to the Allsvenskran.

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