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When England crashed out of the World Cup at the hands of a youthful, exciting and fluid German side last summer, the reaction was universally angry. There was ire reserved for the players who let themselves down so badly, from Wayne Rooney’s outburst after the Algeria game to John Terry’s laughably inept attempt at mutiny and the roundly condemned reports that the players were bored. Some supporters fumed at the team’s coach, Fabio Capello, whose approach suddenly seemed inflexible and unimaginative and generated calls for his head beyond the usual cock-eyed Little Englander criticism.

But it was noteworthy that the structures of English football became the real villain of the piece if one cared to look deeper than the tabloid back pages. While Capello under-achieved and his players failed to make up the difference, it was finally all too clear that the answer to English football’s inability to make a mark on the world stage is not to appoint a bombastic Englishman as the coach, or to embrace 4-2-3-1; it’s reform, and it must begin in grassroots youth football. The newspapers ran stories slamming the dearth of qualified coaches in England compared with Spain and Germany, both of which managed to combine either genuine or relative success with glorious football in South Africa.

As the nation picked meticulously over the skeleton of the latest England disappointment, an investigation into grassroots football was already underway. This week the Football Association’s Head of Elite Development, Gareth Southgate, outlined his proposal based on the results of the 18-month examination and, in combination with St George’s Park, finally gives cause to be optimistic about the long-term future of English football and the England national team.

Southgate’s proposals will be put to a Football Association vote in September and it is already apparent that they have quickly gained a lot of support, at least away from Wembley. If ratified they will represent an important positive step towards establishing appropriate reform in the grassroots game that enhances our prospects at the top, the very essence of Southgate’s role.

What, exactly, is the problem that Southgate is facing down like a sobered-up, tobacco-spitting desperado outside the Last Chance Saloon? The surface symptom is simple: England is not producing world class international footballers. At his best, Wayne Rooney has the natural talent to be considered befitting of that label, but he’s a rarity in that sense. Leafing through the chronicles of recent history only David Beckham, Paul Gascoigne and a handful of others even have a claim to it. Even if the nation is capable of producing one or two excellent players in a generation, a more problematic reality is that it does not and cannot produce them en masse. The so-called “Golden Generation” was anything but, and there’s little indication that any forthcoming generation will be better. There are players emerging - Jack Wilshere of Arsenal being perhaps the most exciting - but there is no team of quality talent to surround him.

Most worryingly there seems to be little ability to nurture talent. The National Football Centre at Burton-on-Trent addresses a fundamental structural flaw but it is not a grassroots solution. Both Spain and Germany have far more coaches at various levels than does England. Disregarding the hard numbers, there’s a sense in the game that English coaches are themselves not trained as well as they could be, and they aren’t well placed to ensure that the country’s ability to nurture talent is up there with Europe’s football giants. Training methods must be a central part of any reform that results from Southgate’s work.

The marquee proposal from the former England defender is the enforced downsizing of matches at youth level. In Spain - to whom we constantly refer because they are both world champions and the nation that produced Xavi, Andres Iniesta and a host of other remarkable players - children do not play 11-a-side football until they are 14 years old; I played 11-a-side football from the age of ten. Southgate is quite rightly proposing that English children play small-sided games (sevens or nines), on smaller pitches, until the age of 13. To my mind this shows the veracity of the findings of the research, as I’d argue that 12 is too young to play 11-a-side but 14 is too old a starting point if England is to bring through prospects as early as Germany, for example.

Small-sided matches is an obvious reform. It shifts the focus away from the ability to run around a large pitch and, while fitness and athleticism are clearly important in the modern game, it shouldn’t be forcing naturally gifted players out of the game too early or preventing scouts and coaches from spotting them in a crowd of muscly early developers with Gary Neville moustaches. Crucially, it also generates more touches on the ball for each player, theoretically improving their comfort on the ball and ensuring that they are calm in possession as they grow. In my opinion this is just as vital in training as in matches. Idealistic it may be, but I think that youngsters should have a ball at their feet as much as possible. Fitness is important, but technique is what English players as a whole don’t have enough of.

Quoted in Henry Winter’s piece in the Daily Telegraph, Southgate also made a cutting assessment of England’s ability to find even the gems it does produce at youth level:

I suppose we’ve had a Paul Scholes come through who would have been able to play in that Barcelona team because his quality of touch, pass appreciation, ability to play one-touch and to manipulate the ball was up there with them. But would we have produced lots of them like Xavi, Iniesta and Messi? I suspect not. We would probably have overlooked a lot of those and not necessarily at club level. It might have been years before that: at Sunday football level, the guy who was trying to win a league didn’t pick the smaller kids.

Again, Southgate exposes the real nub of an issue here. Talented young footballers do not get the necessary opportunities to prove themselves because of a focus on athleticism and physicality that stems from the adults involved - coaches and parents - taking it all too seriously. The idea that kids’ teams must win at all costs as young as the age of 10 or 11 is an overlooked but fundamental spanner in the development works of elite talent in English football, and it’s heartening that Southgate recognises the problem.

Of course, playing like Barcelona is more a rhetorical weapon than a genuine aim, but do I hope that Southgate and the FA do have a similar approach in mind, if not necessarily a copycat style of play. Some of football’s most feted sides were and are the product of a system, innovation and institutional consistency. None of these are beyond the means of the English.

Tags: Football Association, Gareth Southgate