Financial Fair Play

[Broseph Stalin]

The foreigner limit is the worst thing that ever happened to Russian football and it completely destroyed Russian national team. And honestly, Russian premier league is a pretty bad reference point for competitiveness since most Russian football clubs still heavily rely on state financing which completely eliminates any need to be profitable or to run clubs as a business.

Also, Gaich was loaned out not because CSKA couldn’t afford him. He was just utter shit

[brehme1989]

The foreigner limit is the worst thing that ever happened to Russian football and it completely destroyed Russian national team. And honestly, Russian premier league is a pretty bad reference point for competitiveness since most Russian football clubs still heavily rely on state financing which completely eliminates any need to be profitable or to run clubs as a business.

Also, Gaich was loaned out not because CSKA couldn’t afford him. He was just utter shit

Yes, they couldn't afford to keep him on the roster, not to pay him. Having him around meant that they were missing out on the chance to have a better/more suitable player in his stead. ie if he was still around, getting a foreign quota, the team would be worse off.


The foreigners limit did not "happen" to Russian football, it was always there. Not sure what you're referring to. All leagues had a 3-5 foreigners rule until 1996 and then it became 3 to 5 non-EU spots for European teams, but gradually for some.

Italy actually has one of the strictest rules on non-EU players.

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I'm not sure what the right number of people per team to pick, clearly its not 20 (e.g. the top 20 players wont all be at United, a number of them would start elsewhere), but that squad depth at the bottom of the league starts to look really fucking thin quite quickly imho.

There's no problem with that really. It's only an issue for the casual couch potatoes who play video games and will whine about squad building becoming "hard".

What you've done is not wrong or anything, it's just hypothetical and the reason I won't go further is because you could come up with tons of assumptions and examples, so it's just clash of creativity to that point.

But what is not, is with everyone else. You focused on the domestic players, but instead you should have focused on the foreigners.


Back to the Manchester City example that I started, I will just assume that the 5 players that Guardiola would have kept are:
Kevin De Bruyne
Bernardo Silva
Ilkay Gundogan
Ederson
Ruben Dias

and for whatever it's worth, I'll assume that Aguero holds a British passport after all those years, so he gets to stick around.

This means that the following players could not play for Manchester City this season: Joao Cancelo, Aymeric Laporte, Oleg Zinchenko, Gabriel Jesus, Riyad Mahrez, Nathan Ake, Ferran Torres, Benjamin Mendy, Zack Steffen, Rodri, Eric Garcia, Fernandinho, Philippe Sandler.

Where do these players go? Assuming that some of them want to be in the PL and are better than the foreigners that teams will be keeping, you could assume that a player like Mahrez, Rodri and Cancelo could find a job at Arsenal o Tottenham. But they'd either settle for a midtable club, move to their country to play for a top club, or move to a lesser league for a strong team there. The first option makes the league stronger, the second option makes their national league stronger and the third one makes European competitions stronger. As a result, staying at Manchester City just makes Manchester City stronger. And since this is the new norm and what I'm talking about is actually the vast majority of football history, this is just a return to normality, rather than something radical. We are currently living in the radical.

And sure, Manchester City would look to sign better English/British players. And they'd probably sign some. But they wouldn't be able to fill their roster with the England and Wales national team, they'd have 10 players at best perhaps, and only half of those would be starters. Where does this come from? Just look at every roster of World Cup or Euro from WC94 and EU96 and back. Rich clubs isn't something new. Dominant clubs isn't something new. Yet, you didn't see them all the time in Europe, they didn't expect to win every game in their domestic league or in Europe. They went to what now seems like obscure grounds and were happy if they got a draw. That's real parity. And this is the only way to achieve it.

The Dutch team of 1996, when Ajax was dominating Europe, had 8 Ajax players + Seedorf (from the 1995 CL) then at Sampdoria.
The Spanish team of 1994, when Barcelona was dominating Spain, had 9 players from there.

That's as dominant as you can get. When you have teams that can also afford the top guys, then it just diminishes. The only country where this may still be an issue is Germany.

[.h.]

I get the argument that foreign talent will be further dispersed, but I think you'd only group together the best national players further. As I posted above, its actually not ba that more than half of the best 40 players from each country dont play at their top clubs.

Infact, you probably end up with the big countries just hhoarding more people from Brazil/Argentina etc. As a first degree approximation, Germany, Spain, Italy, England, Holland, maybe even France and Portugal will mostly keep their own best players.

I get you'd porobably argue this is a good thing to make football overall more competitive, and I cant really disagree with that I suppose. But in terms of local nationality players, they'd end up more clumped than ever.

I think your examples illustrate it quite nicely - Barca and Ajax held the vast majority of their national team's players.


If you look at those Italian player valuations, you've got Verratti, Barella, Donnarumma, Chiesa, Bastoni are the only ones worth more than 50mil - its not entirely inconceivable they end up at one, MAYBE two clubs. Right now we're the only club who own more than 1 of those guys.

[brehme1989]

Just a note that those valuation numbers fluctuate according to club and national performance much more than they do based on individual quality.

And a reminder that the problem we're facing now is with clubs who can buy 3 top 5 players from 8 nations and just stack up. With a foreigners limit you're curbing that.

[.h.]

I know, but it was a good starting basis tbh.

[Broseph Stalin]

Yes, they couldn't afford to keep him on the roster, not to pay him. Having him around meant that they were missing out on the chance to have a better/more suitable player in his stead. ie if he was still around, getting a foreign quota, the team would be worse off.


The foreigners limit did not "happen" to Russian football, it was always there. Not sure what you're referring to. All leagues had a 3-5 foreigners rule until 1996 and then it became 3 to 5 non-EU spots for European teams, but gradually for some.

.

Nope, Russia introduced their first restrictions on foreign players in 2004 after Russian team’s disastrous performance in 2002 WC. Here’s an article telling the whole sad story of the Russian league limit on foreign players. It’s in Russian but you can use Google translate or something

[brehme1989]

Nope, Russia introduced their first restrictions on foreign players in 2004 after Russian team’s disastrous performance in 2002 WC. Here’s an article telling the whole sad story of the Russian league limit on foreign players. It’s in Russian but you can use Google translate or something

I vividly remember the 90s were Russian teams had 3 foreigners only and usually it was Ukrainians and Brazilians.

I can read a bit of Russian btw, from what I see this was a discussion on how you got to field the teams, based on Blatter's proposal of 6+5. Russia iirc meddled with this a lot.

At the moment there is still a restriction on foreigners in Russian football but they've been slowly abandoning it(I think 8 then 10, then 12-13 foreigners in squad or something but only 5 or 8 can play?).
Makes sense, since everyone else is YOLO, you fall behind if you don't abuse the system yourselves. But being an outsider league and with a federation that's indecisive, you get many rule changes as you go. You see this a lot in most of Europe as well, and it is very common in the Americas.

But for the most time since the full effect of the Bosman rule, I think Russia had 5-8 foreigners limits. Now they had it at 6 foreigners on the pitch and switched to 8 foreigners total. Which means some teams, like CSKA Moscow with Gaich, would need to offload their extra foreigners in order to create more roster spots.