Football (soccer), restrictions on overseas players

Limiting the number of foreign players will weaken the quality of domestic football. Seeing many of the best footballers from around the world competing against each other every week raises the standard of the whole game. Fans want to see their team playing exciting football and winning games – they don’t care whether the players are local boys or not. Youngsters are inspired by foreign heroes and work hard in order to follow in their footsteps, no matter where they were born.

Reducing the number of foreign players would be bad for the national team. The top sides field many overseas players because they think they are better than most homegrown ones. So those local players at the top clubs have had to fight hard for their places. They are playing against some of the best footballers in the world every week and their game improves as a result. It should be easy to pick 11 of them to form a strong national side. The fact that the England football team has done badly has much more to do with poor management and coaching than the large number of foreigners in the Premier League. If you removed some of the best foreigners and replaced them with less good local players, it will weaken both club football and the national team.

Local loyalties went out of the game years ago – it isn’t just overseas players who change clubs often in search of higher wages. Everyone agrees that when teams were only full of local boys the standard of play was worse. And strong local loyalties aren’t always good – they used to spill over into hooliganism as the fans from rival clubs fought. More overseas players in football, many with different colour skins, have helped reduce nationalism and racism in society.

This plan would be bad for club football by lowering the standard of games. It is also unnecessary – Manchester United is one of the most successful club sides and often fields more locally-born players than its rivals. Most big clubs are working hard to build strong football academies to bring talented youngsters through. In any case, money will still remain vital to success – this plan would mean that the richest clubs will simply pay silly sums of money to buy up all the best local players.

Really the FIFA proposal is just an attack on English football clubs as they have been so successful recently. The issue wasn’t raised previously when Italian and Spanish club sides dominated European competitions.

In practice this plan will do nothing for football in countries outside Europe. Already many overseas players have dual nationality (which is especially easy to obtain for South American players wanting to play in Spain or Portugal). Other players are from countries (e.g. South Africa, Caribbean states) with labour agreements with the EU and can work freely in European countries. Both groups would be able to claim that they didn’t count as overseas players under the FIFA plan, so little would change. One danger is that many good players will completely switch nationality in order to play overseas, and so not be qualified for their original country at all in future.

And what FIFA plans to do about the many Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish footballers playing for English teams is very unclear. Would they be banned from playing in their own country?

FIFA’s plan is illegal under European Union rules. These say that you can’t discriminate against people from other EU countries on the grounds of their nationality – exactly what the six-plus-five plan would do. And the EU has agreements in place allowing people from non-EU European countries like Switzerland and Norway to work freely in EU states, plus a lot of countries in Africa and the Caribbean as well. This means most of the overseas players currently with European clubs would be able to take FIFA to court if it tried to put its plan into practice. And if six-plus-five won’t work in Europe, there is no point applying it elsewhere.

Although FIFA’s plan to limit the number of foreign players is against European Union law, UEFA has another proposal which has gained EU support. This would mean clubs would have to play more “home-grown” players, meaning those who have had at least three years of training between the ages of 15 and 21 in the same country. Because football academies train youngsters from many countries, this would not break EU rules.

Football is a big business, a branch of the entertainment industry. Many European clubs have an income of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Players are well paid but can easily get injured and end their careers at an early age, so they deserve the same protection from unfair treatment as other workers. Freedom of movement is one of the most important principles of the EU and should not be given up lightly.

In any case, there are other ways to raise quality and improve competition. A salary cap could be introduced (as in rugby league) to prevent rich clubs from buying up all the best players. Or revenue for money-spinning competitions like the Champtions League could be distributed much more evenly. At the moment the most successful clubs get almost all the money, allowing them to buy all the best players and so ensure they stay on top in the future.