Culture secretary: 'Premier League teams should field more English-born players'
TOP football clubs should be forced to field a quota of English-born players to make the Premiership interesting again, Culture Secretary Andy Burnham said yesterday.
The Liverpool-born minister said it was a turn-off for all football fans that the game was becoming "more and more predictable", with the same few super-rich clubs grabbing the top prizes.
The answer was to stop those clubs snapping up almost an entire team of foreign stars, which would also boost the chances of England winning the World Cup, he suggested.
Mr Burnham would not be drawn on what the quota should be, but Fifa president Sepp Blatter has called for a so-called 6+5 system.
That would force the likes of Liverpool and Everton to field a minimum of six homegrown players and a maximum of five foreigners - a huge challenge at Anfield, in particular.
In an interview with the Daily Post, Mr Burnham also urged MPs and councillors to fly the world in search of Olympic squads who could be tempted to set up training camps locally ahead of the 2012 Games.
The 200-strong Ukraine team could end up in Leigh, in Greater Manchester - Mr Burnham's constituency - after he flew to Kiev to press the case for its sports village.
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