The Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore has described Sepp Blatter's proposal to limit the number of foreigners playing in the top flight of the English game as "xenophobic rhetoric". Earlier this week the Fifa president accused the Premier League of being too focused on making money, and complained there are not enough homegrown players in first teams.

Scudamore is opposed to Blatter's 6+5 rule – which would see a maximum of five foreign players in starting line-ups in domestic games – and insists the England team's recent success proves the league has the right balance.

"I do struggle where nationalism, jingoism and patriotism stops and where actually some sort of xenophobic rhetoric takes over," said Scudamore. "And there is a certain amount of that in the football world when I keep getting told 'how can English football be English football when there are not enough English players in a particular team?' I struggle with that when everyone bar David Beckham who is qualified to play for England at the top level is playing at home.

"I start to worry that these start to sound like the sort of attitudes that are quite difficult to justify in my football world and I for one am not going to allow that agenda to be washed over. There is nobody more proud of the England football team than me but we can't let that spill over into fear and this sort of agenda."

Responding to claims that English players face too much competition from foreign imports, Scudamore insisted homegrown players are given the opportunity to reach the top level.

"We have a quality agenda, what we want is the best players," he said. "We would like a huge proportion of those best players to be English. That would tick every box – if they were the best players in the world we would have success at international level. Under Fabio Capello at the moment we are enjoying that success. That is the ideal combination. We want the players in our league to be the best.

"We've never had a restriction. The fact is, if you are good enough you will get a chance. The challenge for the English talent is holding their own and that is what is happening at the moment.

"We get accused of not being pro-English because we have so many foreign players, but we also have so many English players and they are playing against the best week-in, week-out. It is possible to be a world league and also an English league."