Kenyon & Blatter Are Wrong: Champions League Ruins English Football

Several months ago Sepp Blatter railed against the influx of foreign players which was ruining the English game, and proposed a “6+5” rule in response. Yesterday Peter Kenyon responded, "We don't support Blatter's plans and I don't think there is any appetite for it across Europe."

In that respect, he’s probably right. But Kenyon continued to pinpoint what he sees as the problem, “Other teams in England should be knocking on our door: teams like Tottenham, Newcastle, Villa, Everton. It's more about them getting their houses in order rather than us coming down to their level.”

But what is the real problem here? Is English football suffering because there are too many foreign players now? And is the league uncompetitive because the clubs immediately below the big four are run by incompetent administrators?

No, on both counts.

Lets deal with Blatter first. He claimed in June, “The best English players are coming from the less strong teams, which is weakening the English national team...the best teams are preparing the national team players for England's opponents.”

But if foreign players are truly to blame for the lack of success of the England team, why did England only win one World Cup in the years before 1995 when the Premier influx of foreign players began?

The progress of the national team in World Cups and European Championships in the years since 1995 has been barely different to that over the entire post war era. Graham Taylor failed to qualify for the World Cup in 1994 with a domestic league containing a much higher proportion of English players.

It has been advanced in favour of the plan that it would stop the big four buying up all the best foreign players, and bring about a level playing field. But this is rubbish. It would just artificially inflate the values of the better English players while the same clubs bought up a scarcer resource. Small clubs would be left in the same position, but with worse players than before.

The arguments simply don’t stand up to any scrutiny at all. And with the opposition of the EU Commission, the whole thing is academic anyway.

Even Culture Secretary Andy Burnham noted today that he would happily argue the case at the EU, but there isn’t much point when the Premier League doesn’t support the idea.

So what about Peter Kenyon’s claim that it’s the fault of the clubs playing catch up? Unfortunately the close season experience of the clubs he names shows this is a fallacy.

Tottenham and Villa are finding it difficult to hold on to the best players, while Newcastle can’t seem to convince anyone to join them—even if they had the money. Everton are having to sell Andrew Johnson to buy more players.

No. The real problem for English, and European, football is the Champions League.

As Kenyon also noted, "If you look across Europe, other major leagues are dominated by one, two, or three teams, so it's too easy to say this is a Premier League issue. What's important is the way we distribute our TV revenues.”

The top four clubs earned £13.9 million, £26 million, £26.4 million, and £28.9 million from Europe, respectively, last year. Fifth placed Tottenham earned £2 million.

Given the reasonably equitable (in football terms) collective bargaining system for domestic revenue in the Premier League, this is a huge distortion.

How can a consistently fifth placed team expect to compete with this disparity of funding? Equally, Peter Kenyon knows full well that it took Roman Abramovich’s injection of cash to propel Chelsea into a perennial top four status.

And even now they find it difficult to run the club on a normal business model.

Blatter can come up with all sorts of hair brained schemes to rectify the number of foreigners in the Premier League. But he has to ask himself why the players want to go to Premier League clubs in the first place.

The simple truth is that, since the reorganization of the European Cup to favour the top clubs in Europe, the best players will always gravitate towards them. British clubs have simply capitalised on this and the strength of its economy to attract investors able to propel them forward in this race between European giants.

Brian Clough once asked "Who thought Derby County could be turned into League Champions”. It was considered an achievement then. It would be impossible now.