British football braces for life after Brexit

As the English Premier League season builds to a climax on the field, club owners are fretting over Britain’s looming exit from Europe.

Theirs is a dominant global brand, one whose income dwarfs that of its main European rivals. But with Brexit, comes a risk: losing access to the luxury end of the international player market that has allowed them to claim to be “the best league in the world.”

“I’m pessimistic about leaving,” Peter Coates, the chairman of Stoke City Football Club, has said. “We shall all look back in five years’ time and think, ‘What the hell have we done this for? We’re worse off.’ And in 10 years’ time we’ll still be saying the same thing.”

The Premier League has already had a taste of what’s to come. The sharp fall in sterling since Brexit means English clubs need to pay more, in transfer fees and wages, to match clubs across the Channel.

And though Brexit will facilitate the Football Association’s aim of having more British players in the top league (an effort long thwarted by European labor laws), doing so has become more expensive than ever. Fears of post-Brexit restrictions on immigration have increased the premium on the few young British players who have broken into the Premier League.

And so it’s no surprise that fans and clubs are wondering: can the Premier League thrive as an island?

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Premier League clubs are already hard at work lobbying the government to exempt EU players from post-Brexit labor restrictions. But it’s a hard sell. A special provision for health workers might be politically palatable. But it’s going to be tougher to make the case for football stars who, unless they play for your club, are perceived as overpaid brats.

Where the Premier League is most vulnerable is its coaching. Only nine of the 20 current Premier League managers are British, and, as a group, they are underperforming. The league’s top seven clubs are managed by foreigners. And the recent arrival to Manchester City of Pep Guardiola, a Catalan who has won trophies in Spain and Germany, has drawn a level of vitriol that mirrors the hostility of the greater Brexit debate.

His unfamiliar, complex tactics are greeted with the nose-crinkling suspicion that used to be reserved for foreign cuisine. His decision to exile national team goalie Joe Hart, a burly, blond embodiment of the uncomplicated roast-beef virtues of the English yeoman soccer player, was met with incomprehension and derision. Indeed, the fact that Guardiola has not yet defeated more assimilated, and tactful, foreign coaches is seen as a comforting reassurance that sophisticated foreign intellectuals don’t always know best when it comes to football.

But when it comes to players, British football runs a staggering trade deficit. Hart, currently on loan from Manchester City to Torino in Italy, is the only top-level English player on the Continent. By comparison, among the 647 players who appeared in the Premier League last season, more than half were classified as non-British. The majority, 208, were from the EU.

“We’re talking about half of the Premier League needing work permits,” Rachel Anderson, a player agent, said.

Last season Leicester City’s title-winning team was built around two players the club unearthed in the less fashionable reaches of the French league: Riyad Mahrez and N’Golo Kanté. Both were winners of the Premier League Player of the Year award. If Britain had not been an EU member at the time, neither player would have qualified for work permits. And the Premier League would have lost a highly marketable fairy tale.

When Britain recruits foreign players from outside the EU, it uses a formula, drawn up by the Football Association, based on recent appearances for national teams to determine whether they are eligible for work permits. A player who represents a country ranked in the top ten by FIFA,  the governing body of world soccer, needs to have appeared in 30 percent of its international matches in the previous two years. The lower the ranking of the country, the higher that percentage becomes. A player whose national team is between 31 and 50 on the ranking needs to have played in 75 percent of games.

The rules are designed to favor quality. If Brexit means that they are applied to EU citizens, this will hurt the richest clubs least. They can afford to buy and pay the biggest established stars. And most of their EU players satisfy the rules. Clubs lower down the Premier League, with less money to spend, often buy potential, in the hope of selling later for a profit. Such players are less likely to have reached the international appearance thresholds. Further down the English soccer pyramid, and in Scotland, the problem would be increasingly acute. More than 400 EU players in the lower English divisions would fail the work permit test.

For many in the U.K., this is seen as something positive. Just as Guardiola and his peers fill high-paying jobs that could, in theory, be given to British coaches, so the army of affordable foreign artisans — once derided by Sir Alan Sugar, the then owner of Tottenham Hotspur, as “Carlos Kickaballs” — can be seen as keeping young Britons out of Premier League teams.

“What we want to do is have a few less journeyman international players,” Greg Clarke, the chairman of the FA, told British media at the start of April. “There has to be a sensible center ground where world-class players are welcomed in the Premier League but not journeymen who are displacing the young English talent.”

Chelsea celebrates its victory in the FA Youth Cup Final last month. Not a single youth team graduate — and only one Briton — was a starter for the first team this season. That could change after Brexit | Jordan Mansfield/Getty Images

And more British players will mean better players for the English national team — whose performance politicians follow with close attention. As the Brexit vote showed, wrapping yourself in the flag of Saint George, while unpopular on the U.K.’s Celtic fringe, plays well with English voters.

Former Prime Minister Harold Wilson once claimed he retained power in 1966 because of the boost to national morale by England’s 1966 World Cup win. That was clearly rubbish; he won reelection in March that year, and the World Cup final wasn’t until July.

But football may have played a role when Wilson stood once more for election four years later. At the time he called the election, his Labour Party was ahead in the polls by a comfortable margin. But then England blew a two-goal lead to suffer a traumatic loss to West Germany in a World Cup quarterfinal. Four days later, the electorate cast their ballots for the Conservatives.

Peter Berlin covered global football for 20 years for the Financial Times and the International Herald Tribune. He is now a freelance journalist covering sports for, among others, Sports Illustrated.