There is something rotten at the core of English football, and it was finally exposed last night.

Yes, it does hurt.

I'd like to be one of those people who have wilfully, and with some justification, abandoned the national team in recent years. The England team is full of dispicable, greedy individuals, hyped to within an inch of their lives. Some really aren't that good at all. When was the last time, for instance, Steven Gerrard really put in a towering performance for England? It's a lot easier when he's surrounded by the foreign quality, which he apparently abhors, at Liverpool.

But despite the fact that I don't actually like many of the England players, it's still England. My support for the national team pre-dates that of my discovery of Arsenal by a good 3 months or so (I was 7 years old), and whilst Arsenal long overtook England in my affections, I still want England to do well.

But they don't, and they haven't done for a long time. Not just since Steve McClaren became manager, but from, almost, the minute we relinquished the World Cup in 1970. England have achieved nothing since then, aside from a world cup campaign in 1990, in which we beat the titans of Egypt, Belgium and Cameroon to reach the semi-finals.

It's too easy, and ultimately erroneous, to blame foreigners for this malaise. As Arsene himself has said, England didn't win anything between 1966 and 1996 when there were hardly any foreign players in the English top flight. The influx of foreign players hasn't made the England team worse; if anything, it's merely highlighted its long-standing mediocrity.

Why buy an English player for three times the price of a foreign player of comparable, if not greater, quality? And before guns are levelled at Arsenal, this club has actually produced or nurtured many decent English players in recent years - the likes of Bentley, Pennant or Upson, players deemed not good enough for Arsenal, but English players of quality nonetheless. I doubt there are many other top-flight English clubs who have produced as many high-grade English players as Arsenal in recent times, even if few have ultimately made the grade at the club. And Arsene doesn't look at passports: if they're good enough, they're good enough, whatever the likes of the Daily Mail and Jermaine 'tag-boy' Pennant may say.

No, the real malaise in English football culture can be seen in every English town across the nation: the dilapidated facilities; the coaches who insist on physicality over technique; the quagmires which serve as pitches; the kids forced to play on massive oversized pitches, instead of being taught basic pass and move tactics in smaller size arenas.

There is something rotten at the core of English football. English football is currently, and has been for the last decade or more, experiencing the greatest influx of money it has ever known. Yet where has this money gone? On Rio Ferdinand's Bentleys, on David Beckham's myriad houses; in short, into the pockets of top-level footballers and those that run top-level football.

The Premier League's inception could have been a chance to reinvigorate English football root-and-branch, to invest at the lowest and not just the highest levels of the game. Instead, we're left with the white elephant that is Wembley Stadium, crap coaches, and average players.

Because that's what's neglecting the next generation has done: produced an over-hyped and under-achieving generation of footballers who really aren't as good, when put together and shorn of the foreign team-mates, as they or the media would like to think.

Who knows when England will really recover from this nadir. For now, get a foreigner to take charge, not just of the team, but perhaps even of the FA. Maybe they could actually teach us a thing or two, if we're actually humble enough to listen.