FOR fans of free-spending clubs in the English Premier League (EPL), the summer transfer window is like an early Christmas present. Every year, the top division’s richest owners unleash their wallets on the finest footballing wares from the rest of the world, giving their supporters a new batch of superstars for whom to cheer. So far, Manchester City has coughed up £85m ($132m) to acquire Fernandinho, a Brazilian midfielder who played in Ukraine; Stevan Jovetic, a Montenegrin forward who excelled in the Italian league; and a pair of Spaniards playing in Seville, the right winger Jesús Navas and the striker Álvaro Negredo. The next-busiest club, Tottenham, exchanged £52m for the Brazilian midfielder Paulinho, the Spanish striker Roberto Soldado and the French midfielder Étienne Capoue. Yet the same fans who will applaud this influx of foreign talent when it is deployed to topple Manchester United, the reigning EPL champions, may come to rue it by the time of next year’s World Cup in Brazil. The English national team currently trails Ukraine in its qualifying group, and has not reached the World Cup semifinals since 1990. There is no shortage of explanations for the side’s long record of disappointment. But its own assistant coach, Gary Neville, attributes its underperformance to the EPL’s transformation from a more or less national circuit to a truly global league. Barely half as many Englishmen played in the Premiership last year as Spaniards did in La Liga or Frenchmen did in Ligue 1. Local players represent an even smaller share of the core talent on the EPL’s best clubs. “We need to protect our English, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish and Irish national teams,” Mr Neville told the Guardian, “by giving more boys from those countries more opportunities. England not winning trophies, or even reaching the semi-finals of major competitions any longer, is a problem for us.”

Mr Neville’s argument is straightforward enough: unless English players have the opportunity to participate at the highest club level, they will not develop the skills necessary for the country to field an elite national team. To address this problem, he suggests that the EPL reinstate an old requirement that every club include a minimum number of local players. When not coaching England, Mr Neville also works as an analyst for Sky Sports, and his broadcast partner, Jamie Carragher, has proposed an even more heavy-handed fix: banning English youth academies from signing foreigners.

Both ideas would have destructive side effects. If Mr Neville’s floor were set high enough—it would probably have to be above five players per team per match to have an impact—it would displace talented foreigners, who would be driven back to rival leagues in other countries and decrease the quality of play in the EPL. That would make for a worse spectacle for Premiership fans, and hurt English clubs’ performance in the high-stakes Champions League. It might also be self-defeating, by softening the competition faced by the very players England hopes to transform into international stars. The same arguments apply to Mr Carragher’s policy, only more so: if English footballers are deprived of the chance to hone their skills against foreign talent when they are young, they have little hope of beating the world’s best once they mature.

Besides, the other countries that host the world’s best club leagues—Spain, Germany and Italy—have all outperformed England in recent World Cups without resorting to athletic protectionism. The last two tournaments were won by Spain and Italy, while Germany finished third in 2010 and 2006 and second in 2002. How have they managed to develop such strong national teams, even as footballers the world over vie for a spot in La Liga (Spain), Serie A (Italy) or the German Bundesliga?

The simple answer is that for all three of England’s rivals, the international transfer market is a two-way street. Many of their nationals are indeed crowded out from their local leagues. However, those players are happy to ply their trade abroad in one of the other elite circuits. According to Transfermarkt, a football information database, 65 Frenchmen played in the top divisions in Spain, Germany, Italy or England last season, and 45 Spaniards, 20 Germans and 19 Italians played in another major league. The English, in contrast, prefer to toil in the second division on their own scepter’d isle than to try their luck in the first tier on the Continent. Just one Englishman, Michael Mancienne (pictured) of the Bundesliga’s Hamburger SV, suited up in Spain, Germany or Italy in 2012-13.

It’s hard to pinpoint a single reason why English footballers are such homebodies. One potential explanation is the language barrier. Since English is the global lingua franca, many foreign players already speak it well enough to be comfortable in Britain, whereas Britons are among the world’s worst at acquiring a second tongue. Yet numerous English players believe that their reluctance to play abroad runs deeper. A majority, says David Preece, an English goalkeeper who had a successful spell in Denmark, have “a fear of something that is alien to them. Many players are unwilling to move their families across this country, never mind the continent”. Sam Parkin, a striker for Exeter, agrees: “The majority of English players,” he says, “are intimidated at the prospect of having to adapt to a new culture.” They may be influenced by the high-profile parochialism of their predecessors: Ian Rush, himself a Welshman, infamously characterised the year he spent in Italy in 1988 with the truism that “it was like living in a foreign country.”

What is clear is that such sentiments have generated a negative feedback loop, which ensures that most English players stay at home. Because it is so hard to lure them abroad, most foreign clubs have given up efforts to scout in Britain. Mr Parkin, who trained with Chelsea, witnessed the fruits of the team’s international recruiting efforts first-hand when it brought in a pair of Italians, Gianluca Vialli and Gianfranco Zola, to play ahead of him. Unfortunately, he says, “there wasn’t much in the other direction”. Lacking the opportunity to put himself in the international shop window, he accepted a move down to Swindon Town in the second division.

Mr Neville clearly has England’s best interests at heart. Unfortunately, he seems to have the solution to his country’s player-development woes backwards. Rather than carving out quotas for talented youngsters at home, the best way to train future stars is to encourage them to mimic their foreign counterparts, overcome their hodophobia, and spend their formative years on the other side of the English Channel.