Greg Dyke and His Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Ideas (Part One)

Greg Dyke is trying to destroy the Premier League as we know it.  His reasons are clear.  He believes that it is his job to do something to improve the English national team no matter what the cost.  Unfortunately, he has put his focus on the “do something” rather than on “improve” or “the cost.”

I recognize that he believes he has good reasons for his actions.  However, as an American I don’t care very much about the English national team.  To be fair, I am sure Dyke does not care that I don’t care. 

However, the Premier League is not and should not be in business to strengthen the English national team.  The changes that have already been implemented and the changes that have been proposed will weaken the Premier League as an international attraction and hurt its claim to be the best league in the world.  Certainly, the League will suffer a significant loss in internal competitive balance.  As unbalanced as the Premier League is right now, it is still more balanced than the other major European Leagues.  That will probably change.  The changes as a whole will also weaken English clubs in the UEFA competitions.  The English national coefficient is already falling.  With these changes it will fall further and fewer English clubs may qualify for the Champions League.

Dyke has already taken one major step to lower the average quality of play in the Premier League by making it harder to get work permits.  He has now proposed an even worse change to the rules governing home grown players which will make it more difficult for any club to challenge the established elite while reducing the quality of play by all clubs, including the elite.  If these proposed rules are implemented in England, but not in the rest of Europe, English teams will have signed on to a Champions League (and Europa League) suicide pact.  While there is some indication that UEFA might go along with these changes  (see here) that would not be good news.  It would simply mean that more people have climbed aboard the stupid train.   Even if UEFA does implement similar rules for the rest of Europe, the rules are still not likely to accomplish Dyke’s purported goals.

Any improvement in England’s national team is a relative thing.  If England gets better and other nations do not, England is improved.  If England stays the same and other nations get worse, England is also improved.  But if every nation improves, England has, effectively, not improved.  Yet, if these rules are likely to improve England’s national team than surely they are just as likely to improve the national team of any other nation that adopts them.  Thus, if the rules are adopted throughout Europe, it is a wash and no one is helped. 

Unfortunately, this is a complicated issue and I am going to have to break my analysis into several pieces.  I will start with a discussion of the rules changes that take effect on 1 May 2015.  I want to emphasize that I have not yet been able to locate the official rule changes with their official wording so I am relying upon the descriptions posted by the FA on its web site and other places on the internet. If I reading the rules for 2014-2015 correctly, the new rules are due to be officially published by May 1, 2015. 

The rule change that has already taken effect changed the rules governing the issuance of work permits for non-EU players.  Descriptions of the rules have been published in identical terms on website after website.  The Southern Daily Echo posted them here. 

The new rules:

1. Players currently must have played at least 75 per cent of their country's senior competitive international matches over the past two years. That will change so the required number of caps is staggered according to the country's status. Players will have to have played at least 30 per cent of matches in the last two years if their country is in the top 10, at least 45 per cent if it is ranked between 11th and 20th, at least 60 per cent if between 21st and 30th and at least 75 per cent if between 31st and 50th.

2. Players currently must have played for a country ranked in FIFA’s top 70 when rankings are averaged over the two years prior to the date of application. That bar will be lowered to the top 50 countries under the new regulations.

3. All players are currently measured over the last two years. The new regulations will allow leeway for players aged 21 or under, who are assumed to be less established and therefore only need fulfil the criteria for the previous 12 months.

4. Under the current system, the appeals process is subjective and dictated by supporting evidence such as scout reports, videos and managers’ references. The panel decides if the player is of the “highest calibre” and invariably it approves, with 79 per cent of applications successful. The new appeals process will be less lenient and based on “predominantly objective measures”, such as agreed transfer value and wage, domestic club experience, European competition experience and international record.

5. The FA estimates that 33 per cent of the players who gained entry under the old system would not have been granted a work visa under the new rules. That means that over the last five years there would have been 42 fewer non-European players playing in the Premier and Football Leagues.

The primary immediate effect of these rules is that it will be easier to sign players from countries ranked in the top 30 and very much harder to sign players from countries ranked from 51 to 75.  It will also be harder to successfully appeal the denial of a work permit for an otherwise qualified player who does not meet the new requirements.  It will probably be easier to get permits for a few younger players who have just started their international careers.  I have seen claims the appeals process will consider whether the transfer fee was over £10 million.  I have no idea whether that will be a hard and fast rule.

Since work permits are not required for players from EU countries and some others, such as Switzerland and Norway, these rules only directly affect players from around 30 to 35 countries since about 25 of the top 70 countries are EU countries and the rules haven’t really changed for countries ranked from 31 to 50.

I toyed with looking at the rosters of various countries over the past two years to see who is or is not eligible under these rules, but decided that it involved too much work for too little gain.  Instead, I just want to focus on the effect of these rules.

Non-EU players will become rarer in English football and the average quality of the ones who do play in England will be higher.  If the rules have the intended effect, these players will be replaced by English players who will of necessity be of lower quality because English players of that quality would already be in the Premier League.  On the other hand, some English players in the Premier League would get more playing time.  The change will particularly affect the less rich clubs because they are the ones who would normally purchase and play non-EU players with fewer international appearances or from lower ranked nations.  (For example, under these rules we could never have signed Guly.)  The richer clubs would continue to buy top players.  Under the new rules, it would have been difficult or impossible for Southampton, Swansea, and Liverpool to sign players like Mane, Bony, and Coutinho.  Instead, they would play in other European Leagues and not come to England until they had played in enough competitive internationals or were expensive enough to win their work permit appeal. Admittedly, since we can now afford to pay £10 million transfer fees, we might be able to adequately deal with these changes.  However, if that turns out to be the case, it merely means that we have become one of the richer clubs the rules unfairly favor.

It is difficult to see how these changes will help the English national team.  More England players will be playing in the Premier League but these will not be players who are good enough for the national team.  The national team players already in the Premier League might get a little more playing time, but maybe not.  English players who are sitting on the bench at Arsenal, for example, will not necessarily play more because Arsenal's non-EU players are of high enough callibre that they will still be able to get their work permits.  English national team callibre players playing for Southampton are already getting all the playing time they need.  These rules will increase the chance that richer clubs would want our players.  If they move to the richer clubs, they will get less playing time.

I suppose the theory is that, in the absence of the mid-level non-EU players, clubs will give young English players a chance and some of them will unexpectedly develop into stars.  This could happen, but it won’t happen very often.  Most of these players will expectedly develop into mediocre players who simply weaken the competitive level of the Premier League.  Moreover, since the big clubs will still be able to get their non-EU players, the primary effect will be to weaken the other clubs—making the league even less balanced.

However much I object to these changes, they are done.  I also recognize that they will probably have only a minor effect on the Premier League.  It is the new proposals changing the Home Grown player rules that will be disastrous and I will discuss them in my next post.