Dyke believes Brexit will benefit young English players
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GETTY IMAGES Greg Dyke, the outgoing FA chairman, hopes Brexit will afford more first-team opportunities to English players while leading sports lawyers warned that the Premier League’s competitiveness could be damaged by the Leave vote.
In both cases much will depend upon whether the United Kingdom abandons the freedom of movement principle when it leaves the European Union. Should that happen then European players are likely to require a form of work permit to play in English football.
Currently the Home Office require non-EU players to have played in a certain percentage of their national teams matches depending on the country’s FIFA ranking. Using that criteria more than 100 Premier League players from the EU such as Dimitri Payet and N’Golo Kante would have failed to have gained a work permit when they signed.
It would also open the possibility of the FA introducing quotas for English players. At present, such a proposal, a long-term ambition of several past chairmen, would contravene a fundamental tenet of EU outlawing discrimination based on nationality.
Dyke has consistently expressed his frustration that the number of English players in the Premier League has dipped below a third and has previously said that applying the Home Office criteria to EU players would stop “an awful lot of bog-standard players” coming to the Premier League.
“One of my concerns in my period as chairman has been the decline in the opportunities for kids at the bigger clubs to get through and into the first team – very few make it,” Dyke told Sky. “If anything happens that gives them better chances, then I welcome it. I think the clubs will clearly want to keep a totally free market [but] whether that is possible we won't know for probably two years.”
Premier League clubs are required to include a certain number of “homegrown” players in their first-team squads. However, “homegrown” is defined by years spent in a club’s academy rather than nationality with a result of many clubs stockpiling the best young European talent. Hence, Cesc Fabregas, Chelsea’s Spain midfielder, is counted as homegrown after joining Arsenal as a 16-year-old.
Yet that would change. Under Fifa article 19, the transfer of players under the age of 18 is prohibited yet it is allowed for minors between the ages of 16 and 18 between clubs within the EU.
“Fifa regulation 19 specifically relates to the ability of an EU member state to employ players aged 16 or above,” Daniel Geey, a partner at sports law firm Sheridans, told The Daily Telegraph. “If the UK is no longer part of the EU then it no longer fulfils that criteria and therefore does not qualify for that exception. That would diminish the Premier League’s ability to buy young European talent and puts them at a competitive disadvantage compared to other EU states.”
The exact effects of Brexit on the Premier League will not be felt until the conclusion of negotiations that could take anywhere between two and ten years. Although much is unclear, there is widespread consensus that no current players will be deported as the Home Office very rarely imposes legislation retrospectively.
Should the UK remain a part of the EEA, like Norway, then it will have to continue to accept the freedom of movement principle and little will change for English football. Yet as Paul Shapiro, a sports lawyer at Charles Russell Speechly, that would run counter to the one of main arguments employed by the Vote Leave campaign of restricting European immigration. “If there are restrictions on free movement then the impact on sport will be more significant,” Shapiro said.
Again the shape and scale of those restrictions is uncertain. Geey believes that in this eventuality there will be a middle ground between the present work permit requirements and complete freedom of movement currently enjoyed European players.
“My view is that there will be a tiered approach where it may not be the wholesale restrictions that are currently in place on non-EEA workers, like professional footballers, coming into the UK,” Geey said. “There may be a type of discrimination based on nationality because that is effectively what the voters wanted.”
Yet immigration is a two-way street and as Geey points out the small band of British players who play abroad, such as Gareth Bale, would suddenly be counted as foreign players. “In the Spanish league there are restrictions on the number of non-EEA players there can be in a team,” Geey said. “Although there are not a huge amount of British footballers who play abroad being classed as non-EEA players, Brexit will makes things more difficult for them.”
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