Foreign Premier League Creates Weak National Team
In the past twenty years, the English Premier League has come to be dominated by foreign-born players, leading many to blame the lack of UK talent in the domestic league for England’s recent world cup demise. But will the Premier League really sacrifice the quality of play for a stronger national side?
Anyone from Manchester United’s former striker Eric Cantona, himself one of the few foreign additions to the Premier League in 1992, to La Liga president José Luis Astiazarán, has said that the lack of English players in the domestic league caused the poor performance of the national team in the tournament.
"Now, even the small teams, they have so many foreigners,” said Cantona to the Telegraph.
“Capello would once have had hundreds of players he could choose, but now how many English players play in the Premier League?”
Value for Money
In the absence of a cap on foreign players, such as La Liga’s cap on non-EU players (only 3 per team are allowed), English clubs have simply sought to acquire talent at the best market value.
Arsene Wenger, manager of Arsenal since 1996, has repeatedly defended his policy of shopping for players outside of the UK by saying that home-grown players are overpriced. £1 million buys more talent in the rest of the EU, or outside it, than it does in the UK.
With such pragmatic economic thinking, and with an influx of foreign managers for some time, the Premier League has become saturated with non-UK players.
In 2009, the BBC gathered statistics to show that more than half of the Premier League’s teams can field an entire starting-11 of foreign born players. At clubs with the most foreign players, such as Liverpool or Arsenal, less than 20% of the squad is made up by UK-born players.
The logic is fairly obvious. With increasingly less Premier League players able to play for the English national team, and with English players still seeming terrified at the thought of playing their football elsewhere (most, anyway), the national team is bound to suffer.
But it is not certain that a cap on foreign players, which has usually been the option put forward in the debate, would help.
In Spain, the non-EU cap has been circumvented by clubs as soon as a player has lived 3 years in the country and is eligible to apply for Spanish citizenship. In one simple stroke of magic, Roberto Carlos, Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi have become EU-players and therefore exempt from the rule.
Of course, it’s not certain that this would be possible in the UK, where 6 years’ residency is required before citizenship is an option.
But with the demand for English players set to rocket in the face of demand, and supply relatively low in the first teams of the top leagues, managers will still look for cheap options abroad to the extent that they will be allowed to.
Turn to Youth Academies
Rather than a ban, a more viable option is to turn to the club’s youth academies, known to produce strong national teams in the long term.
Six of Spain’s eleven starting players came up through Barcelona’s youth academy: Carlous Puyol, Gerard Pique, Sergio Busquets, Xavi Hernandez, Andres Iniesta and Pedro.
Many of these players also formed the backbone to Spain’s team when it won the 2008 European Championships.
The new youth academy regulation in the Premier League, in place starting in the 2010/2011 season, is therefore welcome. It stipulates that at eight players of each 25-man squad must have been with the club’s youth ranks from before they turned 21.
In the long-term, the rule will no doubt improve the quality and quantity of young players in the Premier League. But it makes no mention of nationality, indicating that the Premier League has as its intention to keep the quality of the football at the highest possible level, regardless of a player’s origin.
Therefore, clubs are just as likely to scout for teenage talents outside of the UK as within it in the future.
With the Premier League intent to keep the emphasis on quality rather than nationality, perhaps the solution would be laxer laws on citizenship applications.
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