by Sir Hardly Anyone
Traditionally, Untold has taken more note of the 25 player rule and the notion that only 17 players can be foreign grown, than the inventors of transfer rumours. Our view has been that people who run newspaper columns and blogs propagating the rumours of transfers (97% of which are always wrong) never take into account these numbers and so most rumours simply could never happen.
But also we have been focusing on the effects of the UK leaving the European Union and how this changes the rules, given that EU citizens previously had the freedom to work in the UK without let or hindrance, as the saying goes.
But history is history, and as we know on Thursday 23 June 2016 the EU referendum took place and the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Which we then did on 30 January 2020, with the new rules that automatically had to be applied, being implemented and for the first time affecting transfers conducted after 31 December 2020. In short everyone had four and a half years to get it all right.
Yet amazingly it seems they didn’t, for now the Daily Mail has come up with the notion that the whole thing has been a gigantic cock-up and that the FA (that glorious and wonderful body seemingly made up of an endless supply of sexist and racist old white men) has actually been implementing the wrong rules since 31 December last year!
Hard to believe I know, but there it is.
As a result the clubs say that the FA has been illegally preventing clubs from signing some young foreign players. Specifically it is alleged that the the points based system has not been implemented properly, either because the FA can’t add up or because they don’t want to.
Whichever way you look at it, the post Brexit rules are singularly dehumanising, reducing individual people to a set of numbers. But, tot up enough numbers from your time as a youth player, playing for your country in the various age teams (under 21s etc), and as a full-grown international, and then the door to the UK magically opens.
The accounting system is also supposed to take into account that the club which employs the a player playing with Boca Juniors in Argentina (for example) is automatically worth more points than a player with Arsenal Sarandi, in the same country (Arsenal Sarandi having lost their first three games of this season).
Thus, as is the way with Brexit, players stop being people instead simply carry a score based on their national team, how many time they have played for their club, and the league their club plays in.
And all this accounting business applies to players of all ages, so that a player who is spotted as a high flyer in his youth days can still gain the points to allow him to play in the UK can build up the magic number of 15 points.
However having agreed this convoluted system the extraordinarily dozy FA then “forgot” to set up a system for keeping tabs on players’ games beyond the first team, in order to reach their 15 points.
Now whether the FA did this deliberately to bugger up the entire system, which was created as a compromise, and was not what the FA wanted (they wanted a near total ban on the import of foreign players after Brexit), or whether it was just cock-up number 24,096,354 it is hard to work out, but that it seems is the issue.
The Daily Mail say that the Home Office who administer immigration are blaming the FA and the FA are blaming a gravitational anomaly in Slough. Or they would do if they knew what a gravitational anomaly was and where Slough is.
So the clubs want all the calculations done again in order to allow in the players they want to buy from foreign parts. What’s more they want all the calculations reworked in a different way, because since a lot of international tournaments have been cancelled because of corona-virus, players haven’t been able to tot up points from any international appearances for a while.
And now it gets really murky because in the original rules it was said that there is an appeal system because, well, in transfers in the past from outside the EU there has always been an appeal system. Players (who need 15 points to enter) who only get 10 to 14 points can have their case appealed for exceptional circumstances.
But now the Boris-led government want to stop this appeal system on the grounds that it undermines the sovereignty of Britain. Yet the PL clubs say they only agreed with the new points system because it included the counting of age group games and the right to appeal.
And all this comes while the clubs are demanding that the FA make it much easier for foreign managers and their teams of assistants to work in England which under the Brexit rules has also become a lot more difficult.
Apparently, on hearing that there was dismay, the FA declined to comment. Largely because no one was at home (either physically or mentally).
Gaslighting: how refereeing in the Premier League is manipulated, and why the media never speak about it.
- 1: Are the referees and the media really out to get Arsenal, or am I just imagining it?
- 2: How discussions about refereeing are deliberately stifled by the media
- 3: Referees: the odd statistics that are simply never revealed or discussed
- 4: How we have been utterly misled about football: part 4
- 5: Hiding the problem of refereeing is destroying the credibility of the Premier League
- 6: Revealed: PL referees are not 98% accurate but actually just 75% accurate
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This perfectly sums up the shambles that is English footballing authorities.