You remind me that you're an idiot without fail at least once every four years. And I'm not talking about the squad, I'm talking about you... yes you.

You've plastered half the country in your cheap, "made in China" St George's Cross flags, you've pulled on your overpriced "made in Taiwan" England shirts, you've roamed the streets shouting and chanting "Enger Laaaand" over and over again like retarded trolls.  You've packed out and taken over the pubs and bars. Quaffed back literal oceans of lager. You disrupted the average working day. You slipped off a bit early from work...

when there's a match on, like it's some special religious holiday and you're entitled to or something. You bought any old piece of crap with an England flag slapped on its packaging because you’re an idiot. You've been a good little consumer, well done (Kintard).

But the most idiotic thing you’ve done, is you've deluded yourself once again that England have even a gnats chance in hell of playing well in a World Cup. 

You see one of the things that amazes me most about this country is the utter fascination with a sport that we as a nation are fundamentally shit at.  I'm sure there are many other sports we're shit at as well, but I've never once understood how so many people can be whipped up into such a jingoistic fervour over something at which we basically suck.

The thing is we're never going to get any better at it either.  As a nation we're not really suited to the game.   We have basic inhibiting factors in our country and society that hamper our chances of ever becoming exceptional at the sport. 

There are three basic factors that determine the quality of footballers produced by a country.

Firstly, football has always been perceived as a working class game.  In other words it's a game for poor people (not that you'd believe that if you've ever tried to get tickets to Arsenal).  But fundamentally from a player's point of view, it's a sport more suited to those who are less well off than many other sports, because it has very low barriers to entry.  To play the game, all you need is a large open space, a ball and four jumpers for goalposts.

Now you might think well that's great then, it's not like we don’t have a massive surplus of working class kids with not much to do.  Give 'em a ball and let them get their jumpers a bit dirty, you never know, some of them might even get good at it. But our poor kids are just not nearly as poor as they used to be. 

The standard of living we have in this country and the quality of life we all enjoy is considerably higher than other football loving countries around the world.  Our kids are not as hard done by as they would have us believe. They are in fact quite spoilt.  Even your average council estate, working class family has so many modern "comforts" that the jumpers for goal posts mentality has become a thing of the past. It's more likely we'll start producing world class video games players than football players at this point. 

Secondly there's the weather factor.  Let's have a quick look at some of the greats shall we:

• Argentina
• Italy
• Spain
• Brazil

Notice anything about these consistently good football nations?  Yep they're all hot or at least pleasantly temperate most of the time.  There are a bunch of exceptions to this line of thinking of course, for example neither Holland nor Germany could be considered generally warm nations, but are both good football countries. Other nations that are warm, such as many of the African states and Australia for example, are pretty poor at football.  But there are always exceptions.

Which brings us to the last factor that influences the development of a good national stock of players. Exposure to the high level competitive football. 

In England this exposure is phenomenal.  Football it everywhere, the Premiership is all powerful and endemic. And because of this, there exists an expectation that because we as a people eat, drink and breath football, by extension we should be good at playing it too.  I mean we have some of the very best football clubs in the world right and what even the average Joe knows about the game should surely give us an average edge right? 

Wrong.

The quality of play in the premiership is truly world class, there really aren't many  nations out there that could even hold a light to the array of top English teams.  However those teams, at the top of the football pyramid, are extensively made up of imported players.  And so while the expectation for excellent play is pushed up by such a system, the implication that home grown players are not really top quality, could not be more obvious.

It seems more than coincidental that nations such as Argentina and Brazil, countries that have all three elements in play. They have a warm climate? (check). A large proportion of their population below the poverty line? (check). A social infrastructure advanced enough to create wide spread exposure to the high level competitive football? (check) Then there's a reasonable chance they will consistently produce excellent national football teams and individual players.

Nations that have any of these three elements missing are unlikely to produce a good national squad.  Nations that have two elements missing from the mix (like England) are seriously unlikely to produce. 

And like I said before, there is an exception to every rule, I just don’t think England will ever be one of them.

Get over it.