New rules can help blood more academy talent
FA and Premier League must grasp this opportunity to benefit the game
The summer transfer window: a time synonymous in the football calendar with two of the game’s most keenly-observed traditions, indecision and procrastination, which combine to compress an extensive trading period into a few days and nights of often poor decision-making. But what if we were to throw in an added element of risk to this annual festival of panic? The possibility that some of the multi-million pound acquisitions might be ineligible to play within a few months.
It certainly promises to put a different perspective on this summer window, in which one expects the biggest names in the Premier League will trade extensively, given their relative inactivity during last month’s open market.
Yet there is still no agreement between the Football Association and the Premier League on what the breakdown of a 25-man squad will look like post-Brexit when the transition period ends on Dec 31. Meanwhile, planning is long since under way for the summer.
As the Premier League’s 20 clubs will have been told at their shareholders’ meeting this week, the wise approach is to plan for all eventualities. The FA wants to raise the number of home-grown players in each squad from its existing level of eight to 12, with no work-permit restrictions on the other 13.
The Premier League sees no reason to raise the home-grown quota, and wants the freedom to sign the remainder from wherever its clubs wish to do so.
The FA has the governing body endorsement, from which the Government will take its lead. The Premier League, as it is keen to point out, pays the players, invests heavily in developing the home-grown talent and operates the competition in which all but one of Gareth Southgate’s current squad play every week.
Both entities recognise that Brexit is a historic moment for their respective constituencies: the most lucrative domestic football league in the world and the England national team. Something will have to give.
There has to be a more sophisticated approach that rewards some of the richest clubs in the world for developing English talent – one that echoes the Mexican approach to their own concerns over maintaining numbers of native players in their top-flight Liga MX. There, clubs have to ensure 2,000 minutes per full season for Mexican players aged 21 or under, a tariff which can be topped up by 50 per cent of the total minutes played by any native 22-year-olds.
It encourages the constant development of young players and ongoing planning, rather than squads relying on a core of eight home-grown players, some of whom can be much older and of no use to a national team manager. One is also, inevitably, the third-choice goalkeeper.
The call this week from Premier League chief executive Richard Masters for a “dynamic” solution, one that “can’t just be about quotas”, is the first public indication that the two sides feel there is a viable way out of the stand-off that goes to the heart of the English game.
Indeed, if it is just a simple back and forth over the quotas of overseas players permitted in a 25-man squad, one could see the game tumbling into its own version of a no-deal Brexit where every signing from outside the UK had to be assessed individually for their own work permit viability.
The answer will have to come from a compromise which recognises that what matters are game-time minutes for England-qualified players [EQPs] rather than this dreary battle over the numbers in a squad.
Masters acknowledged that a strong England team is desirable to the Premier League, and that the new system should be flexible. But, in the end, he will have to answer to the club owners, and their priorities are clear. “We just don’t want to take any risks with the current system,” Masters said. “We don’t want to take any risks with the Premier League because it is phenomenally successful.” His opposite number at the FA, Mark Bullingham, also a recent appointment, is obliged to seize this opportunity to protect the future of the England team.
After the 25th round of matches this season, the percentage of total minutes played in the Premier League by EQPs stood at 34.4, up from the all-time low of 29.9 last season. The corresponding figure for this season among the Big Six clubs falls to 27.2. It is too early to say that the small upturn across the league marks a trend. The change has largely been driven by Chelsea’s transfer window embargo in the summer, which forced them to play academy graduates, and then the faith shown in English players by the three promoted clubs, Norwich City, Sheffield United and Aston Villa.
For Southgate, the difference is stark. In Spain, the national team manager Luis Enrique can choose from a league that has 60 per cent Spain-qualified players, not to mention those Spanish players overseas. In France, it is 50 per cent, and Italy and Germany both have more than 40 per cent as well as their emigre internationals elsewhere.
By comparison, the England manager’s pool of talent is shrinking and even the five per cent increase this season does not get him close to the major nations with whom he must try to compete at the European Championships this summer.
The FA has one card to play, its endorsement by government which, for now, still takes the view of the 156-year-old governing body over the modern financial behemoth that is the Premier League.
The clubs have to understand this is a moment in history in which they can benefit from new rules that oblige all of them to give more opportunities to the players coming out of the academies in which they all have invested so heavily.
Much as they dislike regulation, much as they have resisted any oversight from the FA in the past, this is one measure that has the potential to benefit all sides.
Clubs must appreciate this is a moment in history where they can give their academy players game time