Paul McGrath fears the long-term effects of the continental takeover of the Premiership

For us Chelsea fans there's nothing for it this week but to grin and bear it. If Chelsea had been offered the Premiership at the beginning of the season they'd have taken it. The European run ended badly with Jose Mourinho sorely missing his two wide men (Arjen Robben was clearly not match fit) but it has been a good season for Mourinho.

It's been a fine season also for Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez. Not a great one for Arsenal's Arsene Wenger. Good for Everton's David Moyes. Poorish for Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford. Martin Jol is making inroads at Spurs.

There are eight Englishmen managing Premiership clubs. None of them with a top-five club and five of them with clubs in the bottom half of the table. You don't see much of an uptake for English managers abroad. Surely somebody in England is getting worried.

Certainly there's more scope and more money now for clubs to look around the world and get better managers in. There must be a stage though where somebody tries to improve the English concept of management.

The image is of those types who banged fists and threw cups and rode roughshod over players. Today in the Premiership, where the money is so big, that won't work anymore. Players don't respond. They just move on. They don't have to put up with threats. You can bang your fist as much as you like - they won't be overly worried. They're on the phone to their agents.

The old English style does seem to persist in the Championship, where you have that bit of extra power over players still on the way up.

Management skills at the top level have changed an awful lot, not just in dealing with unruly players but in managing a bunch of millionaires.

The continental managers seem to have happier squads. They seem to understand how to interest and motivate players.

You get an old-school guy like Graeme Souness who won't stand any nonsense (and I applaud the way he's taken a stand on Craig Bellamy, Kieron Dyer and Lee Bowyer - you don't just throw the two fingers up like that) but there are other ways of skinning a cat.

It doesn't get to that stage at other clubs.

I was at Aston Villa when we had the first continental manager to work in the top flight of the English game. Josef Venglos was a novelty. He had a lot of new ideas that were a massive step for lads used to the English way of doing things.

He was too nice a man though, a really lovely man who expected too much from us. Players from the big leagues in Europe have a culture of taking care of themselves well. We hadn't.

The training methods were amazing. I remember him trying to get us to hold our breath while sprinting diagonally across a pitch, from corner to corner. You weren't to release your breath till you got to the other corner. The fellas who didn't have heart attacks were cheating.

Technically he was very good and sophisticated but the way he wanted us to play was a big jump too. It took us a season to learn and we almost disappeared from the league. I think we took advantage of him. He wasn't great on the discipline side because he wasn't used to having to deal with that. He trusted us. Once a manager comes in and players understand they can get away with something they will try their level best to test him.

The pattern has changed now. When a manager comes in from abroad he brings a small army with him, assistants and players. Wenger seemed to bring half of France. Mourinho bought in from Porto. Benitez took several Spaniards. It's a good short-cut. You change the politics in the dressingroom, introduce a few players who know what you want and have a different culture.

They have all succeeded to some extent and it's a bit of a wake-up call not just to those players who want to be managers but to the people who run the game in England.

Things change so quickly. When I was playing, Scottish players were the mainstay of nearly every club. Their domestic league has become uncompetitive though, their underage structures aren't great, and suddenly you see hardly any Scottish players.

The top half of the Premiership is getting like that for English players now - not as bad, and there are still exceptional players breaking through - but mainly the youth academies and underage systems are producing lads who will play in the Championship and the lower half of the Premiership.

With Wenger, Mourinho and the likes it's become a real thinking man's game and the top of the Premiership is becoming a separate league. Technically it isn't as good yet as the Spanish or Italian or Dutch leagues, but as a spectacle it can be the best league in the world.

The foreign managers bring something new to the game. They've figured out the pace and the passion and they're bringing their own technical style and mixing the two things together. The younger English managers need to look carefully.

I've been worried about the English game for a long time. There needs to be a supply of young players getting a shot. There is no space or time anymore for a young player to grow. There are very few Wayne Rooneys or Michael Owens or John Terrys. It can't get to the stage where that's the only calibre of player getting a shot.

If it gets tougher for English players to break through it will get even harder for Irish lads. I always hated this time of the year at big clubs. When the young lads don't make it, it's depressing. That was always the hardest part, coming up to the summer the lads who were doing the boots and stuff would start disappearing. You'd hear they were being let go and you'd be there having to say good luck and goodbye to them.

Maybe it sounds parochial but English managers are important for the English game. Generally they are more likely to promote players who have come through the system. It's great to have Liverpool in a Champions League final but if you look at the team they will field (or the one Chelsea would have fielded) there's no huge knock-on effect for England, Ireland, Wales or Scotland. Nothing like there was when the great Liverpool teams went out into Europe.

In the next few years there will be a different sort of person going into management in England. Down through the years many lads have had to stay in football because that was all they knew. The top players now have the choice of walking away. Their money is made.

The players who stay in it now (Alan Shearer and Roy Keane are the biggest names who spring to mind) just have it in their blood. For them the challenge will be to learn to manage in a new way and to motivate players who don't have the passion for the game they have. You look at some of the great passionate Englishmen with teams in the bottom half of the Premiership and you can see the problems that lie ahead.