Paolo Di Canio is without doubt one of the most colourful characters to have ever featured in the Premier League. A mercurial and controversial talent, he was infamously banned from the game for flooring match referee Paul Alcock, but went on to be awarded the FIFA Fair Play Award for a remarkable piece of sportsmanship. He walked a rocky path between those two extremities whilst exhibiting sublime skill and an ability to score outrageous goals.

Although the Italian never won any silverware in the English game, and his critics may argue that he never hit the heights that a player of his talent should have reached, Di Canio brought such individual finesse, passion and excitement that he was worshipped by the supporters of his many clubs and deserves the sobriquet of Premier League Hero.


Paul Alcock is about to hit the deck as he feels the wrath of Di Canio at Hillsborough

Born in Rome, in 1968, Di Canio grew up in a working-class family and signed for his boyhood club of Lazio before moving to Juventus in 1990. Here he had the first of what proved to be many clashes with figures of authority. After winning the UEFA Cup with the Blanconeri he fell out with manager Giovanni Trapattoni and was sent on loan to Napoli, during which time manager Marcelo Lippi called him the best player in Serie A. A move to AC Milan followed in 1994, but frustrated with competing for a first-team place with Dutch legend Ruud Gullit he once again fell out with the manager, this time Fabio Capello, and joined Celtic in 1996.

Italian football's loss was British football's gain and following a single season in Scotland, scoring 15 goals in 37 games, Di Canio made the journey south to join Premiership side Sheffield Wednesday. The striker was an instant hit at Hillsborough, ending his debut season as The Owls' top scorer with 14 goals, including a particularly memorable strike against Southampton when he twice rounded goalkeeper Paul Jones before slotting home an 87th minute winner impudently from the narrowest of angles.

His time in Sheffield was not all glory and admiration; it was also the scene of Di Canio's most controversial moment in England. After being sent off against Arsenal at Hillsborough in 1998 the frustrated Italian shoved match official Paul Alcock to the floor and was subsequently banned for 11 matches and fined £10,000. Di Canio never played for Wednesday again.

Di Canio still looks back on the watershed incident with incredulity and wrote in his autobiography: "I've watched the video a million times and to this day I still don't understand how he managed to fall over like that...My first reaction was that somebody must have been crouching behind him, like in one of those old slapstick comedies."

The Italian eventually returned to action in January 1999 following a £1.7 million to West Ham United and under the guidance of manager Harry Redknapp, who nurtured the spark of genius that flickered within the Italian and gave him the freedom to display his individual brilliance, Di Canio not only rebuilt his reputation but quickly surpassed expectations at Upton Park.

He helped the Hammers qualify for the UEFA Cup in his first season with the club and secured his place in Hammers folklore with an audacious volleyed finish against Wimbledon during the 1999-2000 season that was voted as the BBC Goal of the Season and still sits comfortably amongst the greatest goals ever scored in the Premier League.

Di Canio leapt acrobatically in the air and volleyed home a deep Trevor Sinclair cross from the right into the far side of the net, from a tight angle, with the outside of his right boot. It is this type of unpredictable brilliance that his career in England is remembered for.

Such brilliance that he repeated with an improvised strike in a 3-2 win over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in 2002 when he looped the ball over a defender on the right flank, cut inside, flicked it up with his right foot and volleyed a shot beyond Carlo Cudicini with his left foot from 35 yards out.

It was a truly memorable goal and the type of individual inspiration that prompted Redknapp to say of Di Canio that other footballers would pay to watch him train and persuaded Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson that he could be the final piece of the puzzle as he built yet another team to challenge for football's top honours at Old Trafford in the winter 2002.

Unfortunately for Di Canio, who had been desperate to go, West Ham demanded too much money and the high-profile move collapsed. Instead, he remained at Upton Park and despite another priceless winner against Chelsea in the penultimate game of the 2002-2003 season the club were relegated. An uninspiring move to Charlton Athletic followed in the summer and in 2004 the Italian took a massive pay cut to return to boy-hood club Lazio as English football said goodbye to an enigmatic talent.

Reflecting on the transfer that never was, United boss Ferguson said: "Di Canio would have been capable of becoming a truly great player at Manchester United. I mean, he was a great player. But when you have a player like Di Canio, who expresses himself as an individual, like [George] Best and [Eric] Cantona did, and [Ryan] Giggs, [Wayne] Rooney, Ronaldo and [Dimitar] Berbatov do... we make heroes quickly here. Di Canio could have been in that category."

To many football fans, he always will be.

If Sepp Blatter has one great talent, it's finding two numbers that add up to 11. The FIFA president told a meeting of sports authorities recently: "We hope that in (2012) we'll start with '3+8,' then '4+7' and so on."

Blatter, of course, is talking about the number of overseas players allowed to be in a team's starting XI. He wants to limit the number of foreign players allowed to play for club teams to promote values like national identity and cultural heritage in domestic football competitions.

It's hard to argue against those honourable causes, but there's a whole logistical minefield that needs to be considered in depth before the most 'international' leagues, such as England's Premier League, are irreversibly damaged.



If clubs are forced to field a quota of local players, there is a real fear that the gap in quality between the top and bottom clubs of big leagues such as the Premier League would widen dramatically, to the detriment of that competition. We'll get to that shortly.

Part of Blatter's challenge is defining 'home-grown'. In addition to local players, born and raised in the country they play in, 'home-grown' players will likely be allowed in the allocation of six players in a 6+5 system. A foreign-born player may count as a local if they have been in a country since a certain age, or have been at a club for a certain number of years. But for the sake of our discussion here, let's simplify things and just say that that Premier League clubs must field at least six players in their starting XI who are English. What might happen?

Given there are 20 teams in the Premier League, at least 120 English players would have to be starting in Premier League sides every weekend (six players for each of the 20 clubs).

To put that in perspective, in the recent mid-October round of matches - by my rough calculations - a total of 79 English players started in games. That's around four per team on average, two short of the requirement. Hull City, Wigan Athletic and Blackburn Rovers joined Arsenal with the least Englishmen - at two each - while Aston Villa and Birmingham City could already play in Blatter's world - both had six.

Of course, some good English players would have been injured or suspended that weekend, but let's assume an equal number of 'lesser' English players were only playing because better foreign players were also unavailable. On that basis, I'm going to claim that there are around 80 English players of enough quality to start in the Premier League at its current standard, give or take a few.

Now, in a 6+5 world, you can bet that England's biggest clubs would want the best English players. And they wouldn't want just six of them - what if one gets injured? They will want quality back-ups, too. The traditional 'big four' and serious challengers are going to want at least eight Premier League quality players. Looking at Manchester City's giant squad after their spending this season, you could imagine them wanting ten or more of those 80 players on their books.

Just like now, the big clubs will buy the best players from their smaller, poorer rivals. I could imagine that the vast majority of those top 80 players would be spread around the eight clubs challenging for European places, leaving just one or two decent Englishmen for each of the other dozen teams. Those other teams still need to field six locals, meaning that Championship players and untried youngsters will have to fill the void.

Not only will that result in a drop of overall quality for the Premier League, it will surely extend the gap between the top clubs and the bottom even further than it is now. The top sides will only experience a small drop in quality, replacing between two and four of their world-class overseas stars with locals who are still capable at the top level, while the smaller clubs will be forced to field around half a team who aren't up to scratch.

Longer term, the rule should theoretically benefit clubs who develop their own talent. But so long as lucrative European competition exists, and big money transfers are allowed, it's difficult to see how the top sides wouldn't stop simply buying up the best players. Given the progress made in this season's Premier League in terms of evenness in the top half of the table, that would be a real shame.

My maths hasn't taken those foreign but 'home-grown' players into account. But 'home-grown' brings its own hypothetical problems. Let's say a player must be at a club for five years to be included as a local. The whole transfer market would likely be skewed towards a younger age, as top clubs try to get the best talent on their books earlier and earlier. With no guarantee that a brilliant 17-year-old will become a brilliant senior player, rich clubs may take a 'safety-in-numbers' policy and buy up even more young players than they do currently.

All this is not to mention the farcical on-field situations the law would inevitably bring about. I can imagine first-minute substitutions where lesser local players are brought off so foreign stars aren't wasted on the bench. I can imagine perfectly good overseas goalkeepers getting dropped for second-string locals because a manager needs to meet his 6+5 quota.

Media previews on matches would be more focused on predicting which vastly superior overseas players might be matched up against weaker locals who are forcibly played. Every tactical battle would be underscored by a team's need to field certain players. There would be a massive gap between some of the top overseas players and the bottom of the local spectrum, ruining the on-field dynamic.

I would even question the supposed benefits that 6+5 would bring. It's logical that for every Championship player who would theoretically come up to Premier League level, there is one overseas player who would lose his spot. Many of the Premier League's international stars come from small countries - these players won't want to play in their countries' tiny, less-lucrative domestic leagues.

With 6+5 being a global initiative, there won't be much opportunity for these players in other major European leagues, either. The only growth area of playing opportunity would be in leagues such as the Championship, where clubs that don't often field five internationals would be losing their best players. For all the 'national identity' instilled in the Premier League, we could see a reverse in the second-tier competition.

Those players from places like Guinea and Barbados wouldn't be happy that their chance at earning Premier League wages has been undermined by 6+5, despite their ability to play at that level previously. They'd be lining up to fight FIFA in the courts.

Blatter knows this. He said FIFA "will not implement something before we have a clear legal situation, because if we do not ... a player can immediately go to the European Court of Justice ... and then the whole matter would be a debacle."

The whole thing would be a grand distraction that would take away from the simplistic essence of football. The fans want to talk about football, not algebra. Blatter must find another way forward.

1. Alan Shearer (56)
2. Matt Le Tissier (25) miss once only
3. Thierry Henry (23)
4= Frank Lampard, David Unsworth (22)
6. Teddy Sheringham (21)
7= Gareth Barry, Peter Beardsley, Gary McAllister, Ruud van Nistelrooy (18)

Most consecutive successful penalties in Premier League since 2005/06:
1.Frank Lampard (10)
2. Darren Bent (9)
3. Mikel Arteta, Elano, Danny Murphy (7)