British football: We won, so let's make it worse

• British football: We won, so let's make it worse

  A tale of globalisation and its malcontents

malcontent

Football clubs

We won, so let's make it worse

May 22nd 2008
From The Economist print edition

A tale of globalisation and its malcontents

ENGLISH hearts, you would think, are swelling with pride. In Moscow on May 21st for the first time two English teams faced each other in the final of the Champions League, a football competition that pits 32 of the best teams across Europe against each other. Manchester United prevailed over Chelsea, as the rest of the continent looked on.

OffsideRonaldo: not English, but great

This was no one-off fluke but the latest indicator of the growing dominance of England's Premier League, once a poor cousin of Spain's La Liga, Italy's Serie A and Germany's Bundesliga. Each of its big four clubs—Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United—has reached at least one Champions League final in the past four years.

This primacy owes little to home-grown talent. Twelve of the 22 players who started the game in Moscow were foreign. Roughly half of those fielded in an average Premier League weekend are neither British nor Irish. The most celebrated star (Manchester United's Cristiano Ronaldo) is Portuguese. England's national team failed to qualify for this summer's European championships.

Hosting the world's best without actually besting them is often called “the Wimbledon effect”, after the prestigious tennis tournament that Britain holds each year but is seldom in danger of winning. A better parallel may be with financial services: the City of London thrives on the back of an open market and international talent.

The Premier League's main source of strength is its financial clout. Since the early 1990s, when stadiums were upgraded and lucrative broadcasting deals agreed upon, the league has become a money-spinner. Foreign investors have poured in (Liverpool and Manchester United are owned by Americans, Chelsea by a Russian). England's big four clubs are among the world's ten richest, according to Deloitte, an accounting firm. This allows the clubs to hire the best players, which in turn draws crowds and increases revenues.

In most industries such a virtuous circle would be a cause for celebration. But Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, football's governing body, cites English dominance of the Champions League as proof of the need to restrict how many foreigners a team may field. Michel Platini, the head of UEFA, the European wing of FIFA, concurs. Some old-style hoof-it English managers claim that import restrictions would somehow help the coaching of young British talent.

This is the sort of protectionist tosh that most industries have not dared utter in public since the 1970s. How could a sport get better by limiting competition or lowering standards? English children are bad at football mainly because their training is bad (something other places have fixed). The league football in Britain is unimaginably better than it was. With luck EU labour law will stop Mr Blatter and keep it that way.

tosh, concur, hoof it