The rebirth lasted about five minutes. There was a disastrous managerial appointment, which resulted in yet another failure to qualify. And by 1998, football was a different game. France won the 1998 World Cup, but only a couple of their team played their football in France. Their key men, Zidane and Desailly and Deschamps, played in Italy; the rest played in Spain or England or Germany. Meanwhile, the big stars in English football were Zola of Italy, Bergkamp of Holland, Schmeichel of Denmark. Manchester United, the biggest club in England, had retained a core of young English players, including David Beckham; but Arsenal, my team, had comfortably won the championship with a mixture of English grit and Franco-Dutch flair. Foreign players were, for the most part, better, fitter and cheaper, and they didn't drink much, either. (People like Bergkamp and the brilliant French striker Thierry Henry clearly regard abstinence as the price you have to pay for a career as an athlete, but this attitude was viewed as something akin to cheating by a lot of English footballers.) Before long, the majority of the players in our top division came from outside the British Isles.

The globalization of the transfer market was beginning to rob international football of much of its point. In the old days, you used to look at the best players playing in the club teams and think, What would they be like if they played together? And the answer was that they looked like the national team—that was the idea, anyway, even if in reality the national team, especially the English national team, was often an undercoached and ill-fitting mess. Now, Chelsea, Manchester United, Real Madrid, Juventus, the Milans and Barcelona have replaced the national sides as fantasy football teams. If your national team doesn't contain players from those clubs, it's because those clubs don't want them, which means your national team is no good. Over the last few years, England has even been reduced on occasions to choosing players who are not automatic starting choices for their club sides, an indication of how it's all changed. In the old days, an international-class footballer would have been first on any club's team-sheet. Now, it depends—on the quality of the club, and the quality of the country.

There's no doubt, however, that the foreign imports have dragged the cream of the English players, sometimes reluctantly, toward something approaching competence. We used to be very game, and very limited (and by "we," I may be referring to every single inhabitant of the country); we didn't have to worry about other countries much, because we only played them every couple of years anyway. Now the English players play with or against the best in the world every single week, and they've had to learn very quickly just to stay in the game, and in the profession. Even sane people are beginning to argue that the England team contains some of the best players in the world. Wayne Rooney was a teenager during the 2004 European Championships, but when he limped off injured in the game against Portugal, the team fell apart. He's very strong, incredibly skillful, and as likely to get a red card, possibly for swearing, as he is to score one of the best goals you've ever seen. (In a game against Arsenal last season, Rooney was estimated to have told the referee to f*** off more than twenty times in sixty seconds. As "foul and abusive language" is supposed to be a yellow-card offense, one can only presume that there are some really really bad words, words worse than the f-word and the c-word, that footballers know and we don't.) Frank Lampard and John Terry are Chelsea's most important players, which in the current economic climate means that they are two of Europe's most important players; if they weren't, they would have been sent to the salt mines by now. Ashley Cole is perhaps the world's best left-back, which means that he won't be playing for my team, Arsenal, for much longer. At least half of this England team is seriously good, so when they are beaten in the quarterfinals, as is their custom, there will be pointless anger rather than weary resignation.