by Alex Canfor-Dumas
Soon after England’s dismal exit from the World Cup, theories about how to turn the national side from also-rans to champions began to fly about. The most prominent was that our failure was down to foreigners. Siren voices from the world of football have beckoned us closer to the rocks of knee-jerkism.
Last week, the President of Spain’s La Liga, José Luis Astiazarán, pointed to what he saw as the key difference between the English and Spanish game: “We invest more and more in young Spanish players than in young foreign players…In Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United there are a lot of young Spanish, French and Italian players – maybe this is why at the moment you are not creating young English players.” Among pundits, journalists and fans, calls for a limit on the number of foreign players in Premiership squads are getting ever-louder.
At about the same time, the Tory – sorry, Coalition – government was outlining its plans to introduce a cap on economic migrantion. Herein, of course, lies a parallel between football and politics – one of the few not to have been picked up already in the frenzy of World Cup-related activity in the left-of-centre blogosphere. The proposals are similar, and their consequences will be similar too: both will fail to achieve their aims, and instead cause a good deal of harm. Let’s look at each in turn – starting, of course, with the most important.
The rationale for a limit on the number of foreigners playing in the Premiership, it seems, runs like this. (1) For every foreign player playing, there is a young English player not playing. (2) If there were fewer foreigners playing, more English players would play. (3) This would improve the national team.
If this is indeed something like the argument, it’s a pretty weak one. To sustain it, one would have to believe both that there are currently young English footballers who are forced out of their Premiership club sides by (superior) foreign players, and that these same players have such exceptional potential that they could conceivably go on to become not just full internationals, but players of such quality that they would transform England from a last-sixteen or quarter-finals team to a potentially World Cup-winning side. These players surely do not exist. If they do, where are they? They’re not playing in the Premiership (by definition) and they’re not playing abroad (Jermaine Pennant and Matt Derbyshire are the only English players playing in major foreign leagues). So presumably, if they exist at all, these potentially world-beating stars – denied an opportunity on the big stage by foreign players – are languishing in the lower leagues or dropping out of the game altogether. I just don’t buy it.
The England manager is allowed 23 players at a World Cup, and only eleven can fit on the pitch at the same time. Manchester United alone have over a dozen English players in their first team squad, and there are hundreds playing in the Premiership. The best 23 that England has to offer are getting their chance – they just aren’t good enough. Taking foreign stars out of the Premiership will only make them worse, by starving them of practice against the best in the world, while at the same time decreasing the value of the British game to advertisers and broadcasters, thereby taking away the money that sustains the grass-roots and youth systems. Not one European league has a limit on the number of foreign players, which suggests that we need to dig a little deeper if we want to work out how to improve the England side. That we have subjected our young talent to too much competition, I suggest, is unlikely to be the answer.
What of the cap on immigration proposed by the new government? Leave aside the fact that, in a rare bit of foresight (or populism?), the government has excluded footballers from the cap – it’s even harder to see what the rationale is here. The government claims to want to reduce the total number of immigrants – but the cap applies only to non-EU workers, who make up just 5 per cent of total migration, and the limit arbitrarily selected for this year (24,100) is more than last year’s inflow under Labour’s points-based system. So calling it a ‘cap’ is clearly misleading; at best it tinkers around the edges. But perhaps sheer numbers aren’t what the policy is about. Perhaps it will help the country’s economic plight? The reaction from small businesses – so often dubbed the ‘engine’ of our economy – suggests otherwise, and a policy that limits the ability of firms to hire skilled workers seems to fly in the face of George Osborne’s apparent desire for Britain to be ‘open for business’.
Maybe, though, the policy will make it a little easier for the unemployed to find work in an extremely tough job market? Think again. Under existing rules, employers can’t take on immigrants unless the post has first been advertised in Britain, and has remained unfilled. This means that the immigrants that the cap will now prevent from coming wouldn’t have been taking vacancies that could otherwise have been filled by unemployed workers already in Britain, but rather would be doing jobs which require skills that the current labour force lacks.
Any economist will tell you that caps are almost always inefficient, because they are arbitrary and necessarily inhibit searches for optimum points. The caps on foreign players and on foreign workers will both be counterproductive, damaging English football and the British economy. They reflect an unwelcome tendency to seek scapegoats for our failures, rather than looking hard at ourselves and working out how we can do better. In the aftermath of Spain’s deserved victory last night, it is clear that we need our home-grown footballers to be better-trained in the technical skills that they currently lack and which will be necessary for success in the future. The same, of course, is true for the workforce as a whole. The FA and the government must decide whether they actually want to deal with these difficult issues, or if populist and ineffective solutions are the order of the day.
Alex Canfor-Dumas is a Watford fan, a Labour Party member, and a graduate student in politics at the University of Oxford.
July 13th, 2010 at 12:35
I agree that a foreign player cap is not the way to improve our chances for footballing glory in the future. However, something has to be said about the concentration of players in the Spanish side that play for either Barcelona or Real Madrid. All of the starting XI in the World Cup final, apart from Capdevila play for one the these two Spanish giants (I understand David villa has only just moved to Barcelona so doesn’t really count in this argument), and watching them play throughout the world cup I noticed that they seemed far more on the same wavelength than any of the English players were, which is understandable as they all have far more experience playing with one another throughout the season. The only player that seemed to be tuned into LW instead of MW on the Spanish camp radio was Torres and we can all think up an explanation for that. Anyway, what I believe we need is more English players dominating the spine of English teams. Despite being vehemently against it at the time, had Gerrard gone to Chelsea in 2004, could we have seen an Iniesta/Xavi-esque dominance from Lampard and Gerrard in South Africa? Many people believe Lampard and Gerrard can’t play together but surely Mourinho would have sorted something out, which would have no doubt been carried over to the international stage. Anyway that did not happen and the team that started against Germany in the last 16 had players from 8 different Premier league clubs. Maybe, the difference between Spanish and English football is that we have a big 4 (or 5 or 6) and they have a big 2.
July 13th, 2010 at 13:42
Sorry, I apologise in advance for the rant that will inevitably follow. Whilst your views on immigration resonate with me, i get narked when anyone claims that the numbers of foreigners in the premiership has no bearing on the state of the english national football team – so much so that i always feel compelled to respond.
The best case study to demonstrate the improvement that can be made by playing against top level opposition is in international cricket. Bangladesh have now beaten every test playing nation in ODIs and only a fool would bet on them not having beaten some of the test playing nations in test series by 2020. The exposure they have had over the past 2 years has propelled them forward to a level where they are beginning to hold their own. Sure, it’s been of little interest to the cricket watching public as England have regularly trounced Bangladesh and it has not been a fair sporting contest. However, Bangladesh have improved tremendously as a result, so much so that future series are likely to be a good sporting contest. By this rationale, it surely begs the question why the best young english players are not being given the exposure of playing premiership/european football?
The reality is that the most talented young players are nearly all owned by top premiership clubs but they simply do not get the exposure to the highest levels of football competition. Consequently, they are not improving whilst other countries players are regularly competing in top level football and getting that exposure that is so vital in bringing players forward.
The England Under 21 team reached the final of the european championships. The squad for that tournament can be found here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England_national_under-21_football_team
You can make the point that if they were good enough, these players would break in to their respective teams but that argument simply does not hold sway when the teams they play for are invariably full of already world class players from all over the world. In such a scenario, only an already world class player would break through i.e. Rooney. If there was a system that encouraged/enforced clubs to play these players, the players would inevitably improve from that experience and maybe, just maybe, go on to become great international players rather than drifting through lower league football into obscurity. One thing is certain, these players are not going to become world beaters by sitting in manchester united reserves year in year out.
I could go on but i’ll stop here.
July 13th, 2010 at 15:45
Re: James’s point above. Is that an issue about foreign players, though, or simply about the dominance of the Premier League by a few very wealthy (albeit indebted) clubs? If established English players were keeping out promising English talents, would that be much better?
The problem is surely that the big clubs have enough money to attract and keep a squad of such depth that their reserve side could match the first XI of half the other Premier League teams. If the situation was more level, then a player might be less likely to sit in the Manchester United reserves with the promise of half-a-dozen run-outs a season when they could be a first-team player for another top club.
July 13th, 2010 at 20:24
James,
Thanks for your comments. A couple of responses:
On the cricket comparison – doesn’t the point about Bangladesh strengthen, not weaken, my argument? Bangladesh have (slowly) improved by playing against the best players and teams in the world. They would have improved far less were they only to play against Ireland, Canada, the Netherlands, Kenya etc. And so it is with football – young English players will improve by playing against the best opposition possible. I’d also add that the emergence of Kolpak players in the county game (essentially foreign players) has improved the standard of county cricket, which seems to have coincided with an improvement in the national team.
On young players not getting a chance – I disagree. Many of the most talented youngsters are not, as you claim, at teams already full of world-class players – as just one example, look at the number of youngsters to have come through West Ham’s academy. And as regards those that are – cream always rises to the top. Either they are loaned out to lesser clubs (e.g. Joe Hart) or, more likely, if they’re good enough to be internationals they manage to break into their first teams at a relatively young age – e.g. Rooney, Ashley Cole, Gerrard, Scholes, Beckham and many others.
The problem is not that potentially world-class players are denied a chance – the problem is that not enough potentially world-class players are produced in the first place.
Pleased to see nobody taking issue with the political part of the post though…
July 14th, 2010 at 00:38
Rant:
Agree with you on the football side. The biggest problems in English football have nothing to do with foreign players. We simply don’t produce the kind of technically accomplished player they have as standard on the continent, and when we do they tend to be under appreciated. I’m an example. We also suffer from the fact that the talent we do produce consistently under-performs at international level. About half of our starting eleven are top class, and yet they look like Sunday League as soon as they put a white shirt on.
On the general point about immigration, I would suggest the following:
First, opinion-polls consistently show that the British public are against large-scale net immigration. Regardless of whether you agree with the sentiment, I have always found there to be something intensely abhorrent about political elites riding rough-shod over the will of the people they are supposed to represent.
Second, one could offer various communitarian arguments against… blah blah blah.
Third, although your point about the economic inefficiency of arbitrary caps is well taken, there’s another way of looking at it: we have huge numbers of low-skilled and economically inactive people in this country. This was the case even before the recession. Immigration is a simple, cheap solution which means we never have to really deal with this underlying problem. For example, you say jobs, by law, must be advertised locally for a set period before they can be offered to a migrant worker. Quite true. But, as you also point out, native skills shortages (or motivation problems – under Labour work simply hasn’t paid for many people) mean that there isn’t anyone to fill the vacancy. But what if there really were severe caps on immigration? In this case government and business would actually have to begin properly training the unskilled; properly incentivising work; revamping education and training, etc. etc.
Immigration may well be good for the country. I have no doubt that, in net terms, it benefits everyone posting on this blog (including myself) enormously. But don’t let’s pretend it benefits everyone. Immigration allows us to leave the unskilled unskilled, ensuring that many native citizens who have had least opportunity in life can continue to be ignored by a government and an economy that doesn’t need them.
How do you increase the value of something when demand remains constant? Reduce the supply…
July 17th, 2010 at 10:30
I didn’t put Trevor up to this, honest i didn’t…. from BBC Sports second top story this am:
Brooking identified the lack of first-team opportunities for promising young English talent as a particular reason for the national team’s long-term difficulties.
“There isn’t the depth that we would like coming through,” he said.
“There are players in the under-19s and 21s but the big challenge is where are they going to get first team opportunities in the next few years?
“When I was 17 or 18 I was getting first-team chances at West Ham but now even at the end of the season for a mid-table team, the prize money of £750,000 for each place means clubs won’t take the risk.
“It means you’ve got to be so special to get in at 17 or 18 and we’re not producing those players who can force themselves into the team.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/8830466.stm
On one final point, i’d like to highlight the example of Darren Fletcher as an exceptional case. Unlike most other academy players at Old Trafford, he was promoted to the first team squad and despite initially having 5 pretty/very crap seasons in around the first team, Ferguson stook with him (presumably because Fletcher is a gritty scot). Fans, journalists and players (Roy Keane) alike said he wasn’t up to it and were forced to witness some pretty insipid performances from Fletcher over quite a long period of time but the exposure and resulting experience he gained has enabled United and Scotland to now be able to select a 26 year old big-game midfielder who is pretty much the first name on the teamsheet for big matches. Nobody thought he was going to be the player he is today, he looked a carthorse and yet united continued to stick with him to give him the necessary experience and confidence to establish himself. It is an increasingly rare example of a premier league club committing to a long term strategy. There are very few other examples because there is no short term business case for a club to persist with a good young english player who is taking time to establish themselves as a first team player when they can go and buy an established foreign player who can immediately establish himself.
From a player development perspective, the premier league structure is proving to be hopelessly flawed, as the 18-23 period is a critical part of a players development. Experience of playing the big matches and the confidence that then gives a player at that age is invaluable and they need to be getting that if they are to achieve their potential.