In two words; Howard Wilkinson.
"Four months after leaving Leeds, in January 1997, Wilkinson was hired by the sport's governing body in England,
the Football Association, to act as its Technical Director, overseeing coaching and other training programmes at all levels of the game. Whilst at Leeds, Wilkinson had developed a ten-year plan to create an "English
La Masia" at
Thorp Arch.
[7] In his role with the FA, Wilkinson applied this blueprint on a larger scale to the national game, developing the academy system and persuading the FA to begin the
National Football Centre project. Wilkinson based the plans for the National Football Centre on the French system at
Clairefontaine which nurtured the 1998 World Cup and 2000 European Championship winners. In 1997 Wilkinson published the Charter for Quality which was the basis for which all English academies were to train future stars"
Not only was the football his teams played extremely dour but he was the buffoon who sold Cantona to united for £1m.
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