Fifa quota proposal angers Wenger (BBC News)
… and you can see why. The customary lack of English (or even British) players in Arsenal’s first-team squad has become something of a standing joke. However, I’m not going to criticise Arsene Wenger… he’s simply working within the guidelines available to him, and Arsenal have produced some of the most attractive football in the Premiership in recent years, especially since Man Utd went off the boil and Chelsea became so bullishly charmless.
No, what I object to is the system that allowed this situation to develop. What we’re seeing in top-flight English football is the result of unfettered capitalism. That’s what the Premier League wanted when they broke away from the Football League and took control of their own TV rights, and they’re partly responsible for the outcome… precious few domestic players gaining regular match practice at the top level, with the result that the England squad is a hapless mish-mash of precocious individuals and inexperienced understudies. There are some incredibly talented players in the Championship, but as long as the sports media, the money men and even the England coaching setup are obsessed with the Premiership to the exclusion of all else, we’ll never see those players.
To be honest, I’m not completely comfortable with the idea of a quota, because it’s inspired by the same “TAKING OUR JOBS!” mentality that lies behind all the tabloid asylum seeker hysteria. However, something has to be done before the Premiership becomes a cartel of rich multinational businesses and English football ceases to exist as a unique identity. There’s no doubt that the high-quality, cosmopolitan feel of the Premiership has done much to rehabilitate English football after the dark days of the 1980s, but there are dangers. The rich-poor divide becomes wider every season, and the exclusive band of big-money clubs is becoming more and more arrogant, as the whole G-14 affair demonstrates.
The Italian FA imposed a total ban on foreign players between 1964 and 1980, in order to improve the national team. It’s impossible to prove whether Italy’s 1982 World Cup triumph was a direct result of this ban, but I’d suggest it wasn’t entirely unrelated. A total ban in England would be impractical now (not to mention illegal in the case of EU players) but perhaps there’s scope for a limit on non-EU players? Back to Italy again… at the turn of the millennium in Serie A, there was a limit of five non-EU players per club, three of whom could be on the pitch simultaneously. While that led to a damaging fake-passport scandal, a properly-policed scheme of that sort could be a valuable lifeline for English football.