Rio Ferdinand: England team suffers from 'identity crisis'

Ferdinand believes English football has ‘no identity’

Rio Ferdinand, former England captain, has said that the English national team suffers from an identity crisis in an interview with Sky Sports. The veteran of 81 caps retired from international football earlier this year, after 16 years of service to the national team.

Ferdinand says the problem took root long before current manager Roy Hodgson came to the helm last year. The defender believes that Hodgson’s team, who face Scotland in a friendly on Wednesday, lack the coherence of other national teams, such as Brazil, Spain and Italy.

The 34-year-old calls for a change in English football at the grassroots level so that a connection can be made from the U17 team all the way through to the senior team – even if that means England failing to qualify for a major tournament in the short-term.

“What is our identity?” Ferdinand said. “I’ve said that on Twitter I don’t know how many times and people come back and say, ‘What are you talking about?’ But what is our identity?

“We started to see something when Glenn Hoddle was in charge, (there was) a bit of an identity then, free-flowing football and you would say we were starting to get an idea of the pattern of what he wanted to implement in the team.

“Since then I don’t think we’ve actually really seen an identity, where you could say, ‘that’s an England team,’ where you look at the U21s and go, ‘that’s an England team’.”

“If all the names were taken off the back of the shirts and the colours were changed, you couldn’t go in there and say, ‘that’s an England team, that’s our identity, that’s the way we play.

“That’s from the U16s right up to the senior team. Whereas you look at an Italian team, a Dutch team, a Spanish team, a German team or a Brazilian team, without seeing the names on the shirts, you would identify them because they’re working from a script.

“You could put an U16 lad into the senior Spanish team or Italian team, he might not have the attributes in terms of physique and speed to be able to deal with it, but positionally I’m sure he’d know what to do because that’s what they’re taught, day in, day out.

“I just don’t think you see that connection between our (senior) team and the U21s, or the U17s and the U20s team and the senior team, and I think that doesn’t bode well for the England team.”

“It’s going to take someone to come and grab it by the scruff of the neck and say: ‘This is what we’re going to do and we’re going to take 10 years to do it,’ he said.

“We might not qualify for a World Cup or a European Championship but I would rather not qualify for one or two tournaments knowing that in 10 years’ time we will have an identity that everyone can identify with and say: ‘yes, that’s us’, and be proud of.”