18 Aug 2009(Tue)

Debate surrounding the influx of overseas players into English football is nothing new, but an article published on the BBC website ahead of the start of the Premier League season last weekend highlighted just how much things have changed in the last twenty years. The 1989-90 season – immediately before the Italia ’90 World Cup that reignited the passion of middle-class England for its national game, and three years before the start of the Premier League and its hitherto untold financial world – was one in which the foreigner was still a bit of a novelty. Even the biggest clubs generally had no more than one or two players hailing from outside the UK – champions Liverpool were the exception with five – and even then, the vast majority were born just the shortest of flights away on the peripheries of the European continent.

 

Nowadays, of course, the ratios have almost flipped entirely. Newly-promoted Wolverhampton Wanderers have the highest proportion of UK-born players in their squad at 20:8, but 20-year-old Theo Walcott is the most senior of Arsenal’s four British first-teamers that fight for their places alongside 23 born overseas. The talents that grace the Premier League in 2009 come from as far and wide as Guadeloupe (Wolves’ Ronald Zubar), Kosovo (Lorik Cana of Sunderland), and Gabon (Daniel Cousin of Hull City), while the continent of Asia is represented by an Iranian (Andranik Teymourian of Fulham), an Omani (Bolton Wanderers ‘keeper Ali Al Habsi), and three players from South Korea (Park Ji-Sung of Manchester United, Seol Ki-Hyeon of Fulham, and Cho Won-Hee of Wigan Athletic). Sadly, however, a new season has once again kicked off without a single Japanese player on the books of any of England’s 20 top flight teams.

 

Curiously, very few English players ply their trade abroad in spite of such competition for places, but a tendency for those born domestically to stay at home is about the only thing the Premier League’s player pool has in common with the Japanese top division. Unbound by EU laws on freedom of movement for workers, the J. League’s three-foreigner restriction has maintained the proportion of overseas players at a relatively even level over the past 17 years, with – if anything – a slight shift from the occasional marquee player to a more uniform pattern of lesser-known Brazilians, plus a handful of Koreans now that an additional ‘Asian’ slot has been added this year. Just as Gary Lineker’s injury-plagued spell in Nagoya all those years ago did not exactly herald a succession of Englishmen to follow in his footsteps, only three Japanese footballers have yet made the journey from J. to Premier – Hidetoshi Nakata, who spent a reasonably successful year with Bolton before retiring; Junichi Inamoto, whose nomadic existence had its ups and down; and Kazuyuki Toda, whose four games for Tottenham Hotspur are probably best forgotten.

 

The argument about physical football and smaller physiques may be a lazy one, but that’s not to say it’s incorrect – indeed, it’s worth pointing out that two of the three South Koreans deemed good enough for the Premier League this year do have a grounding in Guus Hiddink’s all-action 2002 World Cup side, while the first thing that Wikipedia cares to say about the third, Cho Won-Hee, is that he ‘is famous for his physical strength and fighting spirit’. If we divide Western European football down cultural (and linguistic) lines, it is little surprise to see that Japanese exports have enjoyed greater success in ‘Latin’ leagues like Serie A, where skilled players enjoy more time on the ball, than they have in the ‘Germanic’ north.

 

There are signs, however, that this could be about to change. Building on the foundations laid by Shinji Ono at Feyenoord, Shunsuke Nakamura’s exploits with Celtic have shown his compatriots that it can be done, and while Keisuke Honda captained VVV Venlo to the Dutch Eerste Divisie title last year, Makoto Hasebe was a regular performer in VfL Wolfsburg’s run to an unlikely first ever Bundesliga crown. Honda, in particular, is now attracting much interest from a number of European clubs following an explosive start to the new top flight campaign in Holland, but in an ideal world, one hopes he will stay put for now before moving to England in a year or two. A carefully managed Germanic education could have great knock-on effects for Japanese football at large.