RE: The Social And Cultural Reason Behind England's Failure In International Tournaments
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I’m not 100% sure I agree with the idea that English football actively prevents the middle class playing professionally and that’s why you find more working class players coming through.
To frame it a different way, you might argue that working class kids have fewer opportunities at other well paid jobs and therefore football is seen as one of the few routes out of poverty whereas for a middle class kids there are more and significantly lower risk professionals to pursue that offer a good standard of living.
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Was actively eliminating not actively prevents. The phrasing matters here. They were just focusing on places that didn't include the majority of their population, which in turn eliminated a big portion of the population. They didn't prevent middle class kids coming through other means, but those were rare cases, add the part about insults and bullying and you see the true scale of the problem. Maybe, "passively" or as "collateral damage" would have been better words.
Lampard, Chadwick, Le Saux, and a recent example is Pattrick Bamford suffered from that as well. I could have added many more examples, but that would have made for a boring read. The culture change barely started when Mourinho and Benitez joined the Premier League which put emphasis on tactics and abilities.
When I said "Many English Premier League executives came out saying that clubs search for talents in the lower class exclusively", it wasn't because I assumed that, it is the result of reading Simon Kuper"s book where executives in Premier League clubs revealed exactly that.
That doesn't change the fact that the country was doing itself a disservice by not focusing its efforts on where the majority of its population. Emphasis on was because that is slowly changing with Southgate's England DNA project.