There are too many English players in the Premier League
It’s damaging for the league and, by consequence, English professional footballers
The 2021/22 season was the first time international broadcast revenues outmatched the domestic. The money, the viewers, the fans are increasingly outside England. They come because the quality of the league is unrivalled in any other country.
This massive revenue stream has propelled international money into Britain, and often into some of the most left behind corners of old Albion; Burnley, Liverpool, Newcastle.
With little else in terms of pride, the fleeting global eye of football fans offers more than a chance to exist internationally, it brings hard cash into cultivating the next fan base, with initiatives cutting through the schools system and local businesses, offering at the very least a chance to dream.
The Championship has been a big winner…
The riches at the top of the game are now such that the prize of promotion for teams in the Championship is in the hundreds of millions. This is the most lucrative second tier in the world — the ninth wealthiest league in Europe.
Take a look at academies like Man City’s and you can see the investment into football development in the UK. The place is breathtaking, an 80 acre site with 17 pitches and a 7,000 seater stadium — all for youth footballers, the vast majority of whom are English.
These players might not make it to the elite ranks of professionalism but they have the very best chance. Compared to anywhere else in the world, the level of elite coaching is second to none.
Meanwhile, more and more Premier League footballers are born abroad…
Of the 515 players in the 2022/23 premier league season only 172 had English nationality. Roll back the years to 1998/99, a full 257 were English, the second and third most reprented nationalities back then were Scottish and Irish.
In the 2022/23 season the second, third and fourth most represented nationalities are Brazilian, French and Spanish — footballs current powerhouse nations.
The headline statistic might make it appear there are less English professional footballers. This is lazy, and statistically inaccurate.
Top level teams would kill for homegrown stars…
Premier league teams would give their right arm for English players who could do as good a job as someone they bring in from abroad…
- It plays well to the nationalist end of the support base.
- Less hassle with relocation, less risk potential with a severed family life.
- They can speak the lingua franca of the dressing room.
Being in the academy systems of England should also give more experience to the fast paced style of the domestic game.
If nothing else will convince you, bear in mind that Grealish cost Manchester City double Haaland, let that sink in.
In most countries, the journey into professional football ends at the top league.
Only a handful of countries have the depth to offer full-time employment to all players in a second division.
In England you have 4 divisions in which to make a living, with many non-league players also earning significant match fees. Not only that, but you have the chance to showcase your skills upward in a way a foreign player could only dream of.
It’s these inherent advantages means Britain enjoys more footballers per population than almost any other country on the planet — narrowly losing out to Spain. Before you strap your boots on it’s also worth mentioning this is still only 1 in 10,432 people.
It would be naive to suggest there would be this level of money further down the pyramid without the halo effect provided by the Premier League.
Turn on the radio and you often hear that supporters would like to see more English players on show. The irony is that because of the Premier League, that option exists, it’s called the Championship, and in the 2022/23 season 136 games will be shown on tv. Even there, with squads filled with homegrown stars, the greatest foreign imports lead the way. It was no surprise when Aleksandar Mitrović hammered the top scorer chart.
This is not because English players are bad, I’m sure Ivan Toney would have something to say about it, but because when you compare the 56.5 million in England with 7.9 billion+ people in the world, you’re outmatched.
In any other industry the Premier League’s success would be a marvel.
In the world of physics, education, medicine, it is generally accepted that top institutions are filled with the best international talent and rarely locals for locals sake.
Imagine the loss of talent if the Large Hadron Particle Collider (LHC) had over 30% Swiss scientists for the sake of it being based in Geneva. More able international scientists would be carrying the work of a weaker pool of Swiss physicists, and we would all lose out.
This is not because the Swiss education system is a failure, but because in a numbers game they should never achieve that level of dominance.
Transpose that to the premier league where De Bruyne, Salah, Jesus, Van Dijk, Son lead the way and Haaland is now destroying all before him. Those are the best of the league, perhaps Kane and Trent Alexander Armstrong could be considered in that cohort, but otherwise the top end of the talent is shipped in from overseas.
Think about the reverse, who are the worst players?
This is difficult to quantify, not least because many players have had zero minutes, but also because minutes don’t directly equate to talent. By taking a sample you can see that while individuals might be difficult to pick out, the nationaility is not.
In Tottenham Hostpur’s 26 man squad there are 9 English players. Six of those have played less than 90 minutes this season — Djed Spence, Japhet Tanganga, Brandon Austin, Harvery White, Fraser Forster, Oliver Skipp — English players take an oversized portion of unused squad members, this isn’t tied to Spurs, it’s true down the league.
Currently 30% of Premier League players are English
It’s one of those facts that pundits love to throw out there, recriminating about the lack of opportunity for new talent. The irony is their jobs depend on the success of the Premier League. If they’re interested in nationalism, which is what this is really about, they can take a paycut and commentate on non-league football.
But while it’s one thing for a punter to get suckered into this self-defeating excercise, it’s another for the manager of England to fall for it:
Let’s say Gareth Southgate was right and the Premier League did drop to 15% English players. You would have to assume that, given international talent outshines domestic players, that the league would be of better quality.
This means those 15%, or around 75 English players, would be playing every week with the best in the world. An England squad needs a third of that. At the top level those players would be more tested, have a greater degree of competition and have more value attached to their training, career and life balance.
The Premier League itself would be the go-to destination for league football, providing even more success on European stage and further dwarfing all rivals. This means down the leagues, opportunity would grow, with local talent seeing even more of the best in the world on their doorstep.
The alternative? The Homegrown Player Rule…
This was based on suggestions from Greg Dyke that to make the England side better they need to be regulars in the Premier League, and if teams didn’t do it, quotas will.
On the face it this was a well intentioned move, but for the reasons listed above, not only will it weaken the top league over time, but as a consequence, it will jeopardise the depth of professionalism within English football.
It sounds good, but it’s the kind of red meat nationalism that stalks Britain, making our best demostrably worse.
But the rules on homegrown players are not unique to England…
Here’s where it get’s interesting, several leagues push for domestic players, and often far more agressively than the Premier League…
There are teams whose entire teams are made up of local players, Atheltic Bilbao for instance.
It’s there in black and white— diversity is the secret sauce of the Premier League. If England wants to have the biggest league, the best football and the most importantly, the tens of thousands of jobs — from scouts to accountants, stadium designers to mascot makers — then bring in the best.
When you see article’s like this…
