Quote Originally Posted by The Dunster View Post
Japan has five times our population, plus a much larger economy - yet at World Cups they have never been past the round of 16 and 50% of the time they fail to get out of their group.
We need to set the bar a lot higher than Japan I think. Plenty of smaller countries with lesser budgets a lot more successful than Japan at world cup level.

South Korea do just as well as Japan but we rarely hear people saying we should be more like them. Not sure why that's the case.
I agree - I am not sure why Japan should be seen as someone to aspire to? Look at places like Croatia - 4m population, country barely 30 years old, yet reach the World Cup final and semis in '98. They have the street football culture, and then pluck the best kids into club football to develop. Inevitably, the best players then go abroad and the national team benefits. That's the way forward, and not too far away from happened with the '06 squad. How many of those kids played on the streets, and then went abroad? A fair few I'd guess.