Looks like Fabio has got his work cut out if he wants to polish the English game.

Firstly, he'll have to begin spending large amounts of time up North in order to rid our beautiful game of the disciplinary dirt that layers mud on football's silk slippers, after Middlesbrough, Burnley, Darlington and Macclesfield were all slapped with fines by the FA for clocking up a Vinny Jones archive worth of yellow and red cards.

While you can excuse clubs wanting to play the game in a passionate manner - it is, after all, a contact sport - the problem remains that the four teams mentioned have some of the highest proliferations of homegrown English players in their squads.

Macclesfield boast 19 out of 24 Englishmen in their first-team set-up, Darlo an incredible 18 out of 21, Burnley boast a Brit ratio of two thirds, while even in the multi-cultural epicentre that is the Premier League, Gareth Southgate's Middlesbrough can still find room for a squad that is an impressive 57% English.

And look at the results - good old-fashioned on-pitch thuggery.

At this rate Garth Crooks will be left pondering not whether there are too many foreigners in the English game, but too few...