November 21, 2007
Are there too many foreigners in English football?
If England beat Croatia tonight, perhaps all will be forgiven, but over the past couple of weeks, all this talk of a "golden generation" in English football has been replaced by the complaint that it’s the fault of the foreigners that English players are rubbish: they’re coming into the top divisions, taking the jobs of English players by doing the work for less, etc. etc. Sound familiar?
I’m not sure this is a plausible argument. As the FT leader on Saturday commented:
That the English team have gone from heroes to “zeros” has nothing to do with being denied opportunities to compete at the top. English soccer was hardly stellar in the 1970s and nobody blamed Johnny Foreigner then. Nor did they when Graham Taylor’s side failed to make the 1994 World Cup.
Imagine if we heard the same clamour from Essex-born bankers in the City of London every time that trading profits slumped: “Those Russian boys in commodities are cramping our style,” or “It’s all the fault of the Yanks in fixed income.”
Two other points are worth making:
1) The more general question about the effect of immigration on native wages and employment is vexed, because so many things change at the same time. Clearly they don’t simply "take our jobs" because as the population expands, so does demand and so do the likely number of jobs. But immigrants could certainly damp down wages. However, there’s persuasive evidence that they do not, looking at natural experiments such as the Mariel boat lift, when 125,000 Cubans suddenly arrived in Miami. Relative to other cities such as Los Angeles and Houston, Miami actually did better, with lower unemployment and faster wage growth than elsewere. (David Card is the guru here. George Borjas presents the opposing view.) The story seems similar in, for instance, Israel, when there was a large influx of Russians after the fall of the Soviet Union.
2) One big difference between football and the real world. Football does have a fixed number of teams in the top division, and so it is plausible to say that foreigners are taking jobs from English footballers. Even if that were proved to have a negative effect on anyone but the footballers themselves, the lessons do not carry over to the British economy.
Update: Rob Minto has more.
Yes, the number of players is fixed for the teams on the ground, but the numbers of games per year is regularly growing…. so injuries and tired people, (my assumption is that they don’t take anything illegal to stay fit)
Posted by: acidtest | November 21st, 2007 at 8:19 am | Report this commentI do not agree about the ascertion that foreign footballers necessarily takes the jobs from English footballers. Although the number of teams in the Premier League is fixed, this is not the relevant metric. If foreigners was not there, clearly the Premier League would be in dire straits (very low quality and hence very much lower turnover). So I posit that the foreigners CREATE jobs for the very best English talent, while the second string of English players battle it out in the second tier being no worse off than they would have been in a foreignerless Premier League.
Posted by: Morten | November 21st, 2007 at 9:21 am | Report this commentMorten and Acidtest are both right, in my view. I was trying to take as seriously as possible the argument that foreign players are taking the jobs of domestic players. It’s hard to take it too seriously, though.
Posted by: Tim Harford | November 21st, 2007 at 9:26 am | Report this commentAnd there is another point: if all the foreign players are over here, shouldn’t there be job vacancies for more English players abroad?
If foreigners are taking english footballer’s jobs surely it is only the worst english footballers who are missing out? With the notable exception of the entire Stockport County squad of course.
Posted by: Matt | November 21st, 2007 at 11:36 am | Report this commentIf we accept the premise that the English Premier League is the best league in the world, it would seem not unreasonable to draw the conclusion that it ought to employ the best players in the world. My understanding is that something like 15-20% of players in the league are currently English.
Are 15% of the world’s best footballers English? On the basis on what I saw last night, the answer is a firm no.
So from the perspective of the Premier League, rather than there being too many foreigners, there are probably too many Englishmen.
On the other hand, the Premier League has helped highlight a hitherto difficult to spot breed. Those players content to sit on the sidelines while pocketing large wages seem more motivated by money than footballing glory. Given that knowledge, and the fact that international football is generally rewarded more by glory than money, it seems peverse to pick such players for a national side.
Posted by: Will | November 22nd, 2007 at 1:43 pm | Report this comment