In Major League Soccer he was hyped as “The Polish Rifle” and is still billed
as “one of Columbus Crew’s all-time greats”. In English football his impact
was less. Robert Warzycha was a reasonable winger for Everton in the early
1990s but no better than Peter Beagrie or Danny Cadamarteri. His nickname at
Goodison Park was prosaic: “Bob the Pole”.
Warzycha was relevant last week when another Merseyside footballer, Steven
Gerrard, suggested curbing the number of foreign imports in the English
game. Only 12 overseas players were involved in the first round of Premier
League fixtures in 1992: Eric Cantona (Leeds), Peter Schmeichel and Andrei
Kanchelskis (Manchester United), John Jensen and Anders Limpar (Arsenal),
Gunnar Halle (Oldham), Roland Nilsson (Shef-field Wednesday), Hans Segers
(Wimbledon), Ronny Rosenthal (Liverpool), Jan Stejskal (QPR), Michel Vonk
(Manchester City) - and Bob the Pole.
Take out Schmeichel, Cantona, Limpar and Kanchelskis and it’s a fairly grey
collection. The central point in any debate about foreign players appears to
have been lost. Football is entertainment. Was life really better for the
audience when Arsenal had Jensen in mid-field rather than Alex Hleb, Tomas
Rosicky and the princely Cesc Fabregas? Or Liverpool featured Rosenthal
rather than Fern-ando Torres? Or Man City turned up to wow spectators with
not Elano and Martin Petrov but Vonk?
The main argument for limiting non-English participants is the national team,
but even if you adhere to the curious view that England’s ineptitudes mean
Cristiano Ronaldo and Didier Drogba should be drummed out of the country
rather than, say, Steve McClaren, it remains a question of priorities.
England play 10 or 11 fixtures per season, five or six at Wembley, which
means around half-a-mil-lion home fans see the team every year. Should the
Premier League really be run for their benefit? Or for the 13m who passed
through its turnstiles in 2006-07? And the cumulative audience of 3.13bn
people in 203 countries who watched last season’s competition on TV?
European law means the idea of imposing quotas on foreign players is dead in
the water anyway, but the real constituency blocking it are not Brussels
bureaucrats but English fans. The Premier League has never been so popular,
with stadiums 92% full – 10% higher than the world’s next most-watched
domestic competition, the Bun-desliga. On that opening weekend in 1992-93,
12 of the Premier League’s 22 teams and four of its 11 fixtures featured no
foreigners at all, and if parochialism pleased the fans they had a funny way
of showing it: analysts fretted because crowds for the shiny new league were
actually down on the levels of the old Division One. The average Premier
League attendance in 1992-93 was 21,125. Now it tops 36,000.
The figures are giddying, but another set of statistics also makes the head
spin. Only 23 overseas footballers featured in Premier League starting XIs
over the course of 1992-3. Last season the figure was 123. This season,
already, it’s 196. Some 60% of the summer’s signings were foreigners and on
any given matchday of the current campaign, two out of every three players
on show are likely to come from abroad. Sixty-six countries supply the
300-plus nonEnglish players in the Premier League, with 24 countries
represented in the “league of nations” squad at Bolton alone.
“It’s a tricky one,” says Craig Burley, a match analyst for Setanta. “There’s
got to be British kids out there with lots of talent who aren’t getting
their chance because of foreigners, but I’ve witnessed both sides. We had
one guy at Derby who arrived on loan in some Jim Smith deal and turned up
with Fabrizio Ravanelli. When we saw him train we thought he’d fallen out of
Ravanelli’s suitcase and they’d stuck a shirt on him. But I’ve also seen the
other side. I played with Ruud Gullit, Gian-luca Vialli and Gianfranco Zola
at Chelsea and Henrik Larsson at Celtic. If you can’t improve your
performance alongside people like that, you’re struggling. I think someone
has to work out a way of making limits but I’m not antiforeign player. I’m
all for quality. It’s quantity I’m against.”
In 1992-93 the England team were not any better than now, about to embark on a
doomed qualifying campaign for the 1994 World Cup. The difference is English
clubs were worse. Leeds United, the last champions of Division One, and
Manchester United, the first of the Premier League, suffered embarrassments
in the European Cup where they were restricted by a “three foreigners” rule
which necessitated Schmeichel and Cantona being left on the bench in some
games. Howard Wilkin-son was in charge of Leeds and as current chairman of
the League Managers Association (LMA), former England coach (for one game),
and the FA’s one-time technical director who foresaw the decline in English
standards when he published his Charter for Quality in 1997, there can be
nobody quite so acquainted with the argument and all its sides.
“Everything comes down to this: if England are playing the quarter-final of
the European Championships they’ll attract a far bigger TV audience than Man
United in the final of the European Cup and the demographic will include
grannies, aunts, nephews, nieces,” he says. “That’s priceless because it
injects into the blood the country’s affection for football and from there
everything starts. So a strong national team is essential. But how do we
achieve it?”
The man who brought to English football perhaps the most famous import of all,
Cantona, is hardly going to be against foreign players and those he
represents at the LMA, who have football matches to win, would not thank him
for suggesting there should be controls on who they could sign and field. He
says: “We can go for quotas or try and raise the bar in terms of
development. Quotas aren’t legally possible and developing better players is
the only long-term solution. Of course those youngsters must have
opportunities to play in Premier League first XIs, but if development is
right you can produce talent and have top players from abroad. While Cantona
was at Leeds we were beginning the programme that was to produce [Jonathan]
Woodgate, [Alan] Smith, [Gary] Kelly, [Ian] Harte.
“We need the FA to pour its energy and resources into what should be the core
activity of any governing body, the development of players and coaches of
quality, but how many minds at the FA is that principle burned upon? The
Premier League and government must play their parts too. There are plenty
examples of nations coming back after years in the wilderness, Norway,
France. Did the French change something in their coffee? No, they rolled out
a strategic plan in conjunction with government. We dissipate so much energy
with the FA, government and Premier League bickering.”
Efforts to produce a cohesive action plan are stalled because of the FA’s
insistence that it should be the lead agency in any drive to raise
standards. Soho Square is wary of ceding any more power to the Premier
League. The Premier League, from whose clubs the bulk of any initiative will
be funded, do not see why it should trust with its money a governing body
which presided over a decline in national team performance long before the
Premier League existed.
The government is represented by Gerry Sutcliffe, a sports minister who
decided to attack players’ wages as “obscene” before quoting the wrong
figure that his prime example, John Terry, is paid. In the meantime, the
knee-jerkers will shout that it’s Johnny Foreigner’s fault. That’s what they
said when Sven Göran-Eriksson was England coach; then we got McClaren.
The anti-foreign legion
Sir Alex Ferguson
Manchester Utd manager
For the good of the game in England, it would be good to see more home-based
players at the top clubs. There would be opposition from Liverpool and
Arsenal but if you asked a neutral, they would rather see more home-based
players
Steve Coppell
Reading manager
We’re the English Premier League, yet the majority of the teams at the top of
the Premier League have few English players. We must protect our identity by
having a number of English players
Michel Platini Uefa president
I don’t like the system that scours other countries for the best young talent
to bring back to their team. I want to protect the young players of 14 or 15
years of age who need to stay with their hometown clubs
Gerry Sutcliffe Sports minister
It just doesn’t feel we have got the balance right at the moment and that we
need to look at what is possible... We have got the best league in the world
but we need to have a look at what the impact is on national teams
A brief history of the foreign invasion
- At the start of the Premiership in 1992, just 10 players in the starting
lineups for the fi rst weekend were foreign – John Jensen, Anders Limpar
(both Arsenal), Eric Cantona (Leeds United), Michel Vonk (Manchester City),
Peter Schmeichel, Andrei Kanchelskis (both Manchester United), Gunnar Halle
(Oldham Athletic), Jan Stejskal (QPR), Roland Nilsson (Sheffi eld Wednesday)
and Hans Segers (Wimbledon). Robert Warzycha (Everton) and Ronnie Rosenthal
(Liverpool) came on as substitutes
- On December 26, 1999, Chelsea became the first Premier League side to field an
entirely foreign starting lineup. On February 14, 2005, Arsenal were the
first to name a completely foreign 16-man squad for a match
- Of the 220 players who started Premier League matches last weekend, only 77
were English.
The breakdown was as follows:
7 Middlesbrough
6 Aston Villa, Derby, Newcastle
5 West Ham
4 Bolton, Chelsea, Everton, Portsmouth, Sunderland, Tottenham, Wigan
3 Birmingham, Blackburn, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United,
Reading
1 Fulham
0 Arsenal
- Englishmen have scored just 29% of Premier League goals this season. Not one
of Arsenal’s 27 has been scored by an Englishman
- Average attendances are up 50% since 1992
