Foreign and proud: Illogical home-grown quotas will hurt British talent

The ‘home-grown’ issue is one that has long plagued the Premier League, causing particular furore around the time that England are knocked out of major championships.

The usual scaremongering follows, with tales of good English players not given their chance in the big leagues and cheap foreign imports replacing the existing talent that could be used in a club’s academy.

Going hand in hand with these notions is the idea (usually purported by serial crackpot Sepp Blatter) that teams should be forced to field a set number of home-grown players in order to boost national identity and preserve the cultural heritage of a country’s league. Not only is this unlawful and unfeasible, but a counter-intuitive notion that will set European football back years should it ever be implemented.

Since the now-famous Bosman ruling of 1995, players who are European nationals are allowed the same freedom of movement throughout Europe as any other worker. The European Court of Justice deemed it unlawful to restrict the number of foreign European nationals in any football club, giving way to the culture of fielding almost entirely foreign sides that is now prevalent in some Premier League clubs.