English football is in crisis. But then, English football is always in crisis. Every time a major tournament slips past without the national team making a splash, every time qualification for the next one starts to look a little sticky, something has to be done. Something always has to be done. And as the body that theoretically runs the English game, it falls to the Football Association to do it.
FA work permit changes would be useless at best, and possibly harmful
Taking a look at the FA’s proposed crackdown on foreign players in England.
Harold Cunningham
Back in May, an FA commission headed by chairman Greg Dyke announced a four-point plan to improve the English game. The proposal that caught the eye at the time was the wildly controversial and poorly received idea to introduce Premier League B teams into the wider footballing pyramid, in the hope of smoothing the progression from academies into the first-team. But also identified as a concern was the shrinking proportion of England-qualified players within the leagues. Those dastardly foreigners. They come over here, they play our football and, so the thinking goes, they undermine the England team in the process.
The FA calculated that during the 2012-13 season, only 32 percent of starting players in the Premier League were eligible for England, down from 60 percent in 1992-93. By 2022, the FA is targeting an increase to 45 percent, and last week Dyke unveiled his proposed changes to the process of signing foreign players. Restrictions can’t be placed on players from other countries within the European Union, but when it comes to everybody else, Dyke is seeking to “create a necessary constraint that will encourage more considered and valuable player acquisitions from outside the EU.”
As things stands, players from outside the EU are required to obtain a work permit before they are allowed to play in England. The current criteria state that a player must have (a) come from a country in the top 70 of the FIFA rankings, and (b) have played in 75 percent of his country’s competitive internationals in the last two years. These criteria can be bypassed on appeal if a club is able to argue that the player in question is sufficiently talented as to warrant the requirements being waived. Dyke has stated that of the 122 non-EU players granted work permits since 2009, nearly half didn’t meet the criteria.
The proposed changes actually make it easier for players to gain work permits in some circumstances. The FA are suggesting that the international appearance requirement be lowered from 75 percent to 30 percent, but that the list of eligible countries be slashed only to FIFA's top 30. Such a move would benefit players such as Chelsea's Willian, who as a consequence of Brazil's strength in depth did not meet the 75 percent criterion and so had to granted his work permit on appeal, or Seattle's DeAndre Yedlin, whose will not have played the requisite 75 percent by the time his move to Tottenham comes around. Simpler to pick up players from stronger nations; impossible to pick them up from weaker ones.
Well, impossible unless the club are willing to pay for it. Another proposal is that the criteria could be waived entirely where the transfer fee exceeds a certain amount; the FA have suggested £10 million. So if Manchester United want to buy Guadeloupe's hottest property, then they can, as long as they pay £10 million or more. It's a strange idea, both slightly tasteless — more power to you, rich clubs! — and rather lacking in nuance. As pointed out by Tor-Kristen Karlsen, former director of football at Monaco, a flat fee makes no account of free transfers, or of fees that are affected by expiring contracts. It also creates a curious and counter-intuitive situation in which clubs that negotiate well are actually disadvantaged; where they are forced to incur costs that they might otherwise be able to avoid. Where they might actually have to haggle the price up in order to get a deal done.
“We will reluctantly accept £7.5 million.”
“Er ... how about £10 million?”
Other restrictions will be also be imposed. The appeal process will be made much stricter: clubs will only be permitted to appeal on the basis that an error has been made somewhere in the process. And players brought to England on this basis will not be permitted to make loan moves. If a club wants the player, a club will have to play the player.
The final suggestion is that only clubs from the Premier League will be permitted to apply for these work permits, effectively limiting clubs in the Championship and below to domestic players and the EU. Dyke pointed out that in the past four years, 23 successful applications had come from the Football League, though since 792 players start each weekend across the Championship, League One and League Two, that doesn’t seem a hugely significant number.
All of which adds up to a collection of tweaks and adjustments that don't, at least on first glance, seem to offer much of a solution. It remains to be seen whether the greater freedom given to Premier League sides to shop around the fringes of the strongest national teams would be countered by the fact that they won't be able to loan their purchases to other sides. And we should note that the FIFA rankings are peculiar and volatile things; by the current standings, several noted footballing nations sit outside the top 30, including Senegal, Nigeria, Egypt and Japan.
A bigger concern is that this whole enterprise may be entirely unnecessary. Dyke points out that 20 years ago, 60 percent of the Premier League were eligible for England, but any correlation between this percentage and international achievement seems sketchy at best. England may have reached the semi-finals of Italia '90, but they finished bottom of their group in Sweden '92 and failed to qualify for USA '94.
Less anecdotally, the Adam Smith Institute, a libertarian economic think-tank based in London, recently published a paper entitled "Sweet FA: Why foreign player crackdowns hurt English football". Contra Dyke, they concluded that "the proportion, or total amount, of minutes played five, or ten, years ago by English players in the Premier League, is unrelated to international performance," and that "neither Italy, Spain, Germany or England seems to do any better when their citizens are playing more total minutes, across the top four leagues as a whole".
Further, they also presented evidence to suggest that “a league’s overall strength ... is predicted by the current amount of foreigners playing in it”. As such, as well as having no positive impact on the England team, restricting the number of foreigners playing in the Premier League would “risk substantially curtailing the overall quality of the world’s most popular football league.” This tallies with a 2010 study which concluded that importing high quality foreigners actually brought about an improvement in the national team.
Which is, in theory, precisely what Dyke is seeking to achieve. Reacting to the proposals above, the Institute released a statement concluding “Overall most of the proposals are either trivial or welcome, and shouldn’t worry us too much. But the attitude and goals that the FA evince should worry us — cracking down on foreign players threatens to wreck English club football while doing nothing to improve the English national team.”
Ultimately, this is the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one. These rules are proposals and will be subject to negotiation; the current set of guidelines were eventually determined after input from just about any footballing body you care to mention. But the suspicion is that the Adam Smith Institute won’t have too much to worry about. If we know one thing for sure, it’s that the Premier League is very unlikely to sign off on anything that will stand in the way of their staying the biggest, loudest and bestest.
See More:
