The national team's troubles can be traced back to the formation of the Premier League and the resulting influx of foreign stars.

In June 1991, when the Football Association supported the plot by England's First Division clubs to break away from sharing money with those in the other three divisions, they promised it was to improve the England team. All in football knew the decision was really infested by politics: the big clubs were determined to keep the millions about to pour in from satellite television, while the FA wanted to smash the Football League to win a dreary administrative turf war of its own.

So the FA produced its Blueprint for the Future of Football, a flabby document obsessing about fans' disposable income, with one explosive recommendation at its core: that the top clubs should be allowed to have their separate Premier League.

"The prospects of success for the England Team would, at once, be enhanced," the blueprint proclaimed, although it never convincingly explained how.

The plan was that the First Division clubs would break free of the Football League and its century-old system of sharing money between large and small. The new Premier League would shrink to 18 clubs by 1996-97, allowing for fewer matches, fresher players and more time for international get-togethers. Improved, overhauled coaching would help power the England team to the top of the world.

English football's renaissance after Hillsborough had begun a year earlier, when England overcame a turgid start to gallop to the semi-final of the 1990 World Cup in Italy, ultimately, undeservedly, going out to Germany on penalties.

Fifteen years on from the formation of the Premier League the 20 clubs - slimmed from 22 but never as far as 18 - are triumphant; bank accounts poised to accept the first slug of next year's barely believable £2.7bn TV deal. Several chairmen-owners who agitated originally for the breakaway have made millions by selling out to businessmen queuing up for a share of the game's global media revenues. On the field Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool, all foreign-owned, crowd the last eight of the Champions League.

Yet internationally England have never matched that 1990 performance, achieved before the Premier League was formed supposedly to improve the team. The current players stumble about like strangers, denounced by a crowd scorning the money they make. For the superstars of the Premiership Andorra is a massive game.

The reasons for this are many, although we should not overstate the difference between the 1990 achievement and now: England reached the semi-final then only thanks to David Platt's injury-time volley against Belgium and two Gary Lineker penalties in the quarter final against Cameroon. In the two most recent major tournaments England have made it to the quarter-finals, only to go out on penalties. Perhaps a manager other than Steve McClaren would be wresting inspired, joined-up performances from today's team; perhaps not.

Last weekend Trevor Brooking, the FA's technical director, lamented that the English game lacks talent in depth, pointing out that, with no Ashley Cole, Wayne Bridge or Gary Neville, England had no recognised right- or left-back to play against Israel. He might also have noticed a hole where a creative midfielder ought to be, the lack - Stewart Downing apart - of a left-footed attacking midfield player and, with Michael Owen still injured, the absence of an internationally feared striker to play alongside the moody Wayne Rooney.

There is one clear reason for this shortage of players to choose from: the paucity of English footballers turning out at all in the Premiership. When the Premiership's "whole new ball game" kicked off in 1992-93, flush with the first TV deal, worth £305m, only 11 non-British players featured in all the clubs' starting line-ups. Of the first-choice players lining up for the four top clubs in the most recent Premiership matches a week and a half ago only 11 were English. Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand, Michael Carrick and Rooney started Manchester United's 4-1 win over Bolton; John Terry, Ashley Cole, Shaun Wright-Phillips and Frank Lampard began Chelsea's 3-0 victory over Sheffield United; only Justin Hoyte started for Arsenal against Everton while in Liverpool's side that played Aston Villa only Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard were English.

After 1992, as the money grew, English clubs could pay to attract world stars; Jurgen Klinsmann, Gianfranco Zola and Juninho were among the first to fire the imagination and clubs began to compete to hunt overseas talent. Top players, such as Lampard, point out how much they have improved by playing alongside the world's greats but opportunities for the next generation of English players have become painfully limited. The link between the top division and the rest has been broken not only financially but in terms of players' careers. Those who came so close on the world stage in 1990 learned their craft gradually, gaining experience mostly in the lower divisions or even, as with Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle, in non-league football. Now Premier League clubs rarely take a chance on players from the Football League while the non-leagues - the odd DJ Campbell aside - are another country.

Top managers, releasing dozens of players every year who have come through their academies, grapple with sporting and financial stakes so high that they cannot afford to "blood" young players in the way they used to. The money is there to buy ready-made stars, the scouting extends for the most promising youngsters all over the world, so only truly outstanding English players at 16 have a hope of breaking through at the top clubs - and even then, as Theo Walcott is finding, games are limited.

In 1997, flush with the commercial success that followed the Premier League's launch, Howard Wilkinson produced his Charter for Quality, overhauling youth football in favour of the big clubs. Now crowds of boys from as young as eight are signed into clubs' academies, taken out of the school and youth teams that traditionally drilled English talent. For years teachers and youth coaches complained that the trawl is too wide and the coaching too uncertain to justify it - quite apart from the fact that at the same time the clubs have gone shopping for foreign players and so drastically reduced first-team opportunities for their own young graduates. The Premier League waved these objections away, although its head of youth development, Dave Richardson, did admit more recently that the clubs were not sure how to recruit the right players, or coach them, so young.

Now, 10 years on, a review is under way, in which the clubs' argue that they should be allowed to enlist boys from further afield, at younger ages, and not be restricted to local English players.

Contrary to the disingenuous rhetoric about the England team which ushered it in, the Premier League has undermined, rather than boosted, the FA's authority. Clubs are consumed by their own ambitions, not England's, and a period of European domination appears within reach now of those cosmopolitan squads. The England team, stocked with the few homegrown players to come through, and managed by one of only a handful of Englishmen even remotely qualified, comes round as an occasional embarrassment, raising a few difficult questions, all to be comfortably forgotten when Saturday comes.

Humble origins

None of the players in the England team that reached the World Cup semi-final in 1990 spent his formative years at the biggest clubs:

Peter Shilton Began career at Leicester City, 1966-74, including two seasons in the Second Division

Paul Parker Played at Fulham in the Second and Third Divisions, 1982-87, before joining QPR in the First

Stuart Pearce Played his first five seasons for non-league Wealdstone before joining Coventry in 1983

Des Walker Spent the first nine years of his career with Nottingham Forest

Terry Butcher Made his England debut in 1980 while at Ipswich

Mark Wright Played for Oxford before joining First Division Southampton in 1982

David Platt Played his first three seasons for Crewe in the Fourth Division

Chris Waddle Played for Tow Law Town in the Northern League before Newcastle signed him in 1980

Paul Gascoigne Came through at Newcastle United in 1985, then struggling to stay in the First Division

Peter Beardsley Began league career at Carlisle in Third Division, 1979-82

Gary Lineker Made his first 214 appearances for Leicester, 1978-85