FA to limit foreigners in English football

Not enough out-of-the-box thinking from the commission. The EPL might be the 'top' of the English football pyramid, but it is long gone from the FA's control. And why bribe the Football League. Better to pool the money from the participating clubs and setup their own 'academy' league. If enough of them join, they could create a couple of tiers separate from the structure, creating an environment for the home grown to play each other rather than in the lower tiers. Anyway, if the academies aren't implementing best practice, as Wenger implies that they should, then there is no time to start like the present. Fewer nations are standing idle with their own development.

What's the old saying jb " there are non so blind as those who will not see ".

Fadida and Towser. Let's go back to 1945 when a team of Russian footballers visited UK and to the best of my knowledge didn't lose a game.Excuses poured out of headquarters but in some reports gleaned at that time ,written not by journalists but by ex-players with great pedigree,they saw the Russians in a different light,their positional interchanging and speed of foot and passing ability hadn;t been seen before in England but It was pigeon-holed as a fluke!!!!! Move forward 7 years and another team emerged from behind the communist curtain and at last it began to sink in,but it took 2 thrashings from the Hungarians to get the establishment thinking,just thinking mind you,that perhaps there was something to be learned,from these "upstarts" from Europe and South America. However a flawed genius called Ramsey set this thinking back when his mixed bag of players took the World Cup in 1966 to become the most loved manager in England. The Establishment were back on top so instead of examining Ramsey's methods and philosophies they ignored the obvious and the game in England took another backward step.Sure there were a few clubs like United and Liverpool to be followed by Notts County and Villa who dared to employ visionaries instead of "yes-men" but the impetus at national level had gone.Has it been re-gained under the present sytem?. I leave that to the reader. jb

Back in those days Fadida and earlier when as you say it was mainly English/British players in the First Division,the country had no means of comparison(apart from underachieving results compared to expectation). What has happened with the EPL with the influx of foreigners is that it's highlighted the deficiencies of the home grown player. The problems were there before,but lets overlook em and blame the foreigners.

Agree Towser. In the 70's English players were 95% English/British and the national team was rubbish, missing 2 of 3 WC's. There is no correlation between quantity and quality.

Wenger knows the root cause and so does the FA,Football League and anybody else in English Football who cares to take the blinkers off. First to get the FA and Football League on the same wavelength,well good luck,but apart from that arent the Championship,Leagues One and Two and the Conference full of English players? Surely if there's players in England good enough to match the foreigners in the EPL they would be poached from those Leagues? Why bother with a League B. Another "Ostrich " move from English football. Look this "English" problem goes way back to when I was a lad growing up in Sheffield. In the schoolyard we had players who were magic with a tennis ball and not so bad either(ball skills wise) on the park in Inter school matches. However get to Senior football ,totally different story. Physicallity,stamina dominated over the ball players. I remember one lad called Dave,pal of mine, played for Sheffield Boys(15 age group) was Neymar on Yorkshire pudding,scouts everywhere at games checking him out. Saw him at 18 in the pub ,lost interest,why because the big lads as he moved into adult football though he was a ponce,with his silky skills. It was either take a kicking on the park or give it away. Now yes some skilful players(Georgie Best a prime example) could take the knocks,but many couldn't,therefore in the end in English Football physical/workrate overide's skilful. Believe me there is more chance of Australia producing "Technical' Players than England,simply because Australia has little set in concrete "How to play Football" history and England believes because it Invented the Rules of football they still know best. England may have invented football,but it didn't make it creative,that award belongs to other footballing nations.

Not bagging them about foreign workers, but about the anti-intellectualism of the English working classes who are handed power to author such reports in England.

Agree FTR. An Aussie bagging a Euro nation about 'foreign workers/players etc". Good laugh!

Of course its possible! FA is talking about limiting non EU players, not 'foreign players". Thing is, there are loopholes and euro clubs know that. In France, clubs have the right to have 4 non EU players in their squad. 1st loophole: many Brazilians, Africans etc, have dual citizenship and therefore aren't considered as non EU. Take PSG as an example: Pastore, Lavezzi, Marquinhos, Maxwell, Silva, Alex, Lucas and Cavani are all non EU but Pastore, Lavezzi, Cavani and Marquinhos having 2 passports including a EU one, they are considered as 'European workers". Same with Africans: the E.U have agreements (Cotonou agreement being the main one) which supports the development of most African nations. In terms of football, 2nd loophole, they can recruit players from those countries without too much limitation if they are smart (and agents/clubs are smart). I found this fantastic article which explains everything, (only problem its in French) http://soccerpopulaire.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/extracommunautaires-etrangers-joueurs-locaux-tour-dhorizon-des-reglements-europeens-et-sud-americains/

In Thailand the EPL is their AFL or NRL. The main sports league they watch that is constantly on in the TV in the corner in the noodle restaurants, bars, etc everywhere you go and is part of the pleasure of visiting Thailand. That is why you sometimes see Thai script scrolling on the digital billboards that run around the fence in the EPL games and Everton is sponsored by Chang beer, a Thai beer that they don`t export. I have never seen a La Liga or Serie-A game on TV anywhere there. In Mexico the main league is their own Mexican league, but you see La Liga games and EPL on all the TVs during weekend mornings. I currently live in Montreal, Canada and it is mostly EPL here. The time difference to East Coast North, Central and South America is perfect to watch it ... game starts at like 10am on Saturday and Sunday mornings and you can catch a game while eating brunch before doing something with your weekend afternoon. La Liga, Serie-A as well as French, Argentinian, Brazilian, Colombian, etc s on TV here, usually only the Barcelona or Real Madrid game is televised, and you see a lot of Barcalona shirts being worn around in the streets. Serie-A you see on TVs when you go up into little Italy. But EPL is the big one, far bigger than the MLS, and Montreal has a team here. The EPL is the one you discuss with strangers in bars, etc. In 3 weeks I`ll be moving to Houston, TX and there I expect La Liga will be watched a bit more than here because of the large Mexican population (37% of the city) who learned to follow it growing up. In 2001 I lived in Argentina for a year and there they watch Serie-A more than anywhere else (except Italy) that I have visited perhaps as a legacy of Maradonas time there. But still the Argentinian league, EPL and La Liga were all more closely followed there. That is what Rio Ferdinand and Roy Hodgson don`t seem to understand. The Premier League owes the England national team nothing. The EPL is a business like any other. The Russian Oligarchs, American Tycoons and Arab Sheiks who own the clubs care nothing for the English national team. The TV broadcast money from around the world do not care for the English national team, and surely far less than 10% of the audience for a EPL match is even English. The Premier League does not really belong to England. It is this big global thing. You can`t change the rules and devalue it when owners have bought clubs, TV deals been negotiated, advertising dollars been sunk based on it being the superstar global elite competition. All this talk is just hot air.

Only in England? Are you quite sure? How many foreigners are allowed to play in the Super 15? English sport is vastly more open to foreigners than Australasian sport. Try engaging with facts rather than stereotypes.

Slick As- not disagreeing with your logic but one point niggles me,small sided games. The first Crawford report was released in 1992 and I have in my possession a magazine article where a Queensland State Coach is expounding the benefits of using small-sided-games as a means of improving junior education in the game. The magazine is dated 1976,16 years before the Crawford Report and 32 years before we were introduced to our much lauded "curriculum".So where did the idea originate,was it in Holland,the Crawford Report meetings, or was it back in the 1975 coaching manual. Makes one wonder does it not?????. jb

So am I. Serie A is not broadcast in HD most of the time, the league is played in antiquated stadia, Ultras are stuck in the 80's with their attitude to the game and the teams are doing very poorly in Europe despite having better teams on the park most of the time. Serie A's rules wouldn't prevent them from having Man City's squad. The EPL has more money and has always spent more time and money marketing itself to the world than the other coms do and that is why it is the most popular league, apart from the UCL. If Milan, Inter, Juve and even Roma and Napoli had kept up the attack on the UCL then Serie A would still be on the same popular level as the German and Spanish leagues, which I am sure are massively popular in Thailand or Mexico. Serie A as a whole is not an attractive league to watch right now for modern audiences. I am not sure how much IPL you watch but there is a swath of extremely average Indian players playing in that competition, because they have a 4 player limit unlike the EPL.

I'm not talking about quality, I'm talking about popularity. The Indians with their Twenty20 cricket tournament understand the essence of what the EPL is better than the English. That is why they named their tournament the IPL and openly get the best players from around the world to play rather than just Indians from the lower leagues.

Only in England, hey? It is like their cricket team firing their best player in Kevin Peterson and thinking it is going to cure English cricket. See, in Australia when we put together a pannel and spend millions on compiling a report like the Crawford Report, the team is full of retired high-court judges, university professors, sports economists, mathematicians, childhood development experts, educators. And they would study what the Spanish, Germans, Brazilians are doing with youth development, systems, simulating street football environments using small sided games, Clairfontaine style academies. But in In-ger-land they throw together a bunch of geezers like Rio Ferdinand and Hodgson whose report reads: "Its the foreigners, innut? Come 'ere and steal all our jobs, don't they?" And the educated people just kind of roll their eyes and say "Lets just allow this to die down without comment. It'll go away." But lets take it seriously for a moment. It assumes that if Yaya Toure is not playing in the premier league then the replacement promoted from the Championship would have his spot and therefore become him instead. Like become a player like Yaya Toure. But that is clearly not the case. What it would be is those 66 English players in the Premiership would now be playing in the Championship. But since there are more than 66 foreigners in the Championship, there would be a bunch of League One players promoted too. So we are talking a huge drop in standard here. And sending essentially a championship team only without their best foreigners to Europe would mean that Man City and Chelsea would most probably be beaten easily by the likes of Ajax and Feyenoord (which have foreigners). Now, if Japan can't send their best and brightest like Kagawa to the Premiership, but somewhere else like say Holland, are they still going to watch the Premiership? If the Danish don't send their Daniel Agger style players, are they going to watch? The Americans without their Jozy Altidores and Tim Howards? And if those championship quality teams are beaten by the likes of Zenit Saint Petersburg and Shakhtar Donetsk are the Thais still going to tune into the Premiership as the best in the world? So, now in this poorer and worse alternate world, how are the English players going to be any better? I mean by what mechanism? Because even those 66 best players who play currently in the premiership will no longer be raising their level by having to defend against Louis Suarez, instead it will be Sam Vokes the Welshman who plays at Burnley leading the line for Liverpool.

There are many reasons why Serie A has dropped in quality over the last 10 years, and it hasn't dropped as far as many think, but that is not one of them.

I don't think there's any question that it would be illegal under EU law. Non EU citizens always require a work permit so that's a different story. You usually have to play a certain percentage of games for your nation to qualify. I don't see any scenario where EU citizens will not be free to play freely in any EU country. With regard to Scotland, I don't really see that as the issue with the Scottish team. For the longest time, many of the better players in our national team played outside of Scotland. Was only really in the mid 80s with a very strong Aberdeen and Dundee United and the English ban in Europe that resulted in it changing for a while. Most of the time, the best players have played in England or abroad. Scottish football has fallen from grace because we are not producing players at grassroots levels, we're a small population and there are so many other pursuits now than simply football. On the World stage also, when the Iron Curtain came down, a myriad of technically proficient East European nations sprang up better than us at the same time as FIFA reduced (quite correctly) European qualifying slots. That's why we don't qualify for World Cups anymore. There are just simply more teams in Europe and teams such as Bosnia, Ukraine, Serbia etc are all better than us.

Yeah and last time you were in Thailand or Mexico, how many Italian league games did you see on the TVs.

The entire Italian football league pyramid already has a functional cap on non-EU players, so it probably is possible. Though like many things while the cap on non-EU players is functionally three non-EU players; nothing is simple and the finer details are rather more Byzantine in complexity. Only EU citizens, nations from the EU Economic Area, and Switzerland are excluded as part of the cap. The EU Economic Area only additionally includes Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

The article I read had said that clubs would be allowed two non European players, not just foreign (as in non English). The Guardian reports that Man U, Man City, Tottenham and Stoke support the proposals (http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/may/08/premier-league-division-b-teams-fan-commission-greg-dyke-league-three-non-eu-players). For English football, internationally, it would work wonders for the national team. More home grown players to choose from. The same problem has occurred in Scotland. At one stage only Scots were chosen in the top Scottish premiership sides but when players from outside of Scotland made their mark, more were chosen leaving the Scottish national side as no more than a fond memory. Sadly, I do agree with the above in that it most likely won't happen. One of the draws of the English game is watching the cream of football players in action, a large number of whom aren't English. Would Sky pay the money they are playing if the standard reduced because of the "no more than two non European players" in the side?