No shit, Shearer.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/18619259
Not sure who he's arguing with. Who the hell thinks we're going to win 2014?
Fair point on the make-up of the Prem. The last stats I saw showed that only 33% of the players and 20% of the managers are English. Applies to owners too; only 7 or 8 of the Prem clubs have majority English owners.
Shearer almost hits the nail on the head. Almost.
Spain are Barcelona with ringers. Italy, Juventus. Germany, Bayern. These teams have a core that train and play together throughout the year. (There's a bit of a Viktoria Plzen look about the Czech republic, a Porto flavour to Portugal, and Greece have a shade of Olympiacos.)
By comparison, England's Euro squad has a number of current Liverpool players, but they're not the core of the team (and, for that matter, a number of them are fairly new signings at Anfield). The French squad, arguably better, is cobbled together from the big leagues of Western Europe, and the Dutch are scattered even further afield.
It would be an interesting exercise to consider putting together an English side that actually play together. I suspect that the "base camp" would be two of Spurs, Stoke & Sunderland - and for that reason, I'm not going to do it.