Extra leverage over top flight may strengthen England team
FA can force an increase in homegrown talent on Premier League squads, writes Sam Wallace
Gareth Southgate has, in past roles at the Football Association, been one of those who did the hard yards in youth development, touring the country asking grass-roots associations to play children’s football on smaller pitches, or help gain consensus on the new elite academy system.
The England manager knows only too well what a slow-moving world it can be at the beginning of the process that ends with 11 Englishmen capable of contesting a World Cup semi-final. It was why, when he gave his first state-of-thenation address post-russia 2018 last week, he did not hold back on the way in which Premier League clubs have turned their backs on many of England’s world champions at Under-20 and Under-17 level.
He, like others at the FA, will see the Premier League anxiety over Brexit as a problem that needs to be solved. No one wants the destruction of the league but this is an opportunity for the governing body. In English football hierarchy, the FA sits atop the commercial leviathan of the Premier League rather like the oxpecker does the rhino, which is to say if the Premier League wants to leave the proverbial waterhole, it does so without permission. This one is different though: the Premier League needs the FA to negotiate its Brexit deal with the Government.
Life post-brexit will never be the same again for the Premier League, whose clubs have now mined the best talent from the academies of fellow European Union clubs for more than a decade. The signing of players younger than 18 will end for good, which will be a severe blow in itself. But as The Telegraph reports today, the key uncertainty is the criteria that players from the EU will have to meet in order to obtain a work permit.
The FA, and Southgate included, will see the danger to the Premier League in preventing it from signing the world’s best players. Stopping that would be a strange act of self-harm. As for the Premier League, it wants that to continue without restriction, via an exception granted by the Government. The FA, through which any deal for English football will be done, sees an opportunity.
It is most likely that the FA will ask for an increase on the quota of eight homegrown players in every 25-man squad. That will not change the position of the English footballer irrevocably, but as Southgate can attest, small gains add up. This unexpected moment in history has given the FA an opportunity it never expected.