More than my quirky political views, the Fink Tank gets me into arguments.

Some people take issue with the very idea: “you are taking the romance out of football”, they say, which is a conceptual misunderstanding as well as a flattering overstatement of my impact on coverage of the game. Other people take issue with individual propositions.

I can spend a tidy hour at a party defending the contention that the league table can lie. I never get very far explaining to people that there is no such thing as form. But it is England that cause the biggest rows. And today I am going to make that much, much worse.

You see the idea everywhere. The number of foreign players in the Barclays Premier League, we are told, is undermining the England team. It is supposed to be starving the international side of young talent, or some such. Now, I have always thought that unlikely and I have had plenty of rows about it. To start with, England are pretty good. And they weren’t better when there were no foreign players. So I have always had it in for the foreign-player theory. But now I have something more solid.

The starting point for my argument is a piece of work that is controversial all by itself. Dr Henry Stott, Dr Ian Graham and Dr Mark Latham have been looking at what might account for international strength. I’ve told you about this research before, and not everyone likes its conclusions. The national side’s strength is related to population size and to national income.

People can often think of exceptions. Why don’t China or the United States sweep the board at the World Cup, they ask. And I point out that I am only saying that there is a relationship, not that population size entirely determines international achievement. And if you think about it, it makes sense. The more people there are, the more you can pick from. Somehow people don’t find it odd to link population size with Andorra’s poor showing, but they do when I link it with Brazil’s good showing.

But what is the relationship between league club strength and international team strength? The Fink Tank used 5,009 time-weighted Uefa Cup, Champions League and Europa League results to generate estimates of league strength. Each game, whether it is, say, Liverpool v Real Madrid or Fulham v Espanyol is translated into a league match (Premier League v La Liga).

Who comes out the strongest in Europe? It’s England, and it’s not simply a “big four” thing. Spain, Germany, Italy and France follow and then, surprisingly, come Ukraine.

The Fink Tank then modelled international team strength and looked to see whether there was a relationship between league strength and international strength. And there was. A pretty clear one. By and large, the stronger a country’s league, the stronger its international team.

Then came the final stage. We placed all the sides on a graph, relating league strength to international strength. Those above the line were countries whose international side did better than we would have expected given their league. Those below did worse.

What about England? Right there on the line. This result undermines the view that our foreign players are destroying England. It shows that our international team are exactly as strong as you would expect given the strength of the Premier League. There is no feature of the domestic competition that is getting in the way. Pretty solid evidence, I think we can all agree.

Except that I bet we don’t.