“…no premier league CEO is going to willingly allow his very expensive assets to get needlessly injured in some meaningless international.”
But they do all the time, mush. Just last month there was a fairly meaningless series of matches (36 of them, as I recall, to eliminate just eight teams from a pool of 24). Most international matches are meaningless and even more of them are of very poor quality.
It stands very little chance of happening again because England’s top-flight of league football involves relatively few English players. Furthermore, it has been adequately demonstrated time and again that those players that do pull on an England shirt have very little appetite for representing their country.
In the 21st century international football has become an anachronism. Fifty years ago it was unusual to find a foreign player (that is, a player from outside the UK) playing in League football. I recall quite well the astonishment that greeted Tottenham’s signing of Argentinians Ossie Ardilles and Ricky Villa in the late 1970s. It just wasn’t done. Foreigners (bar the Scots, Welsh and Irish) did not play in English football. Today the opposite is true – it makes the headlines when a top club signs an English player. Football has “gone global”. The World Cup and European Championships (and similar competitions across the world) have had their day and should be consigned to history.