Davin Shonfield
Heading into another international break in this stop-start season is not just frustrating for fans right across Europe, it’s a serious concern for managers, coaches and players.
Just when the league campaign is starting to build after the opening rounds of the two European competitions, everything comes to another shuddering halt.
Match training is disrupted. Managers are left to kick their heels. Players lose their rhythm and confidence as they try and adjust to different colleagues and tactics.
Meanwhile owners and directors fret about possible damage to their valuable assets, at the mercy of a mistimed lunge or a sudden twist or turn on a slippery pitch.
It’s not like having to worry about paying the electricity bill or buying a new pair of shoes for the kids, but you can understand why the European Clubs Association is now putting
serious pressure on UEFA and FIFA to curb the number of international fixtures.
Part of the problem is the way that some top-flight clubs have become so internationalised that their players may have to jet off to as many as 10 different countries.
That’s less true of Spain and Germany. At least most of the Barcelona or Bayern Munich players will train together during the international break. But Italian and English clubs will have their teams dispersed right across the continent and further afield as well.
The change was borne out with a vengeance last week in Italy when the Gazzetta dello Sport revealed that for the first time ever, clubs were fielding more foreigners than homegrowns.
Just a few seasons back, in 2007, only around 30% of players in Serie A came from abroad. Then the number suddenly climbed to just under 40% and over the past three seasons has risen again to just over half during the first few weeks of this season.
Conceivably clubs may use more of their homegrown players as the season progresses — which is what happened last year — but as there were 72 more foreigners signed by Italian clubs during the summer, the general pattern is unmistakable. The new imports alone equate to almost 20% of the players used so far this season.
You might expect that the biggest clubs would field the most foreign players. But with the notable exception of Inter, long the most unItalian club in Serie A, that isn’t the case.
Juventus fielded only five foreign players over the first four league games of the season, out of a total of 18. Milan fielded 9 out of a total 22.
The clubs using most foreign players are primarily the middleweights such as Udinese, Palermo and Napoli and some of the stragglers such as Lecce and Cesena.
Not a hard one to work out when you think about it: foreign players are cheaper, just as they are in England. Transfer fees are lower and wages also tend to be lower with the exceptions of megastars like such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic who’s currently on a basic wage of €9 million a year. That’s 9m million after tax by the way — his cost to Milan is more like €18m.
At Lecce by contrast the entire wage bill for plhayers comes to just under €14m million, and the top eight players are all on a basic salary of between €350,000 and €400,000 (again that’s their take-home pay).
Cagliari’s two new Brazilian strikers Nene and Thiago Ribeiro are both on 500,000 while at Udinese, currently leading the table with Juventus, the newer foreigners take home 200,000 or less.
The question for the football authorities, especially for UEFA, is where this leaves the concept of financial “fair play”.
Clubs such as Udinese, which are consistently punching above their weight, depend on their network of scouts to compete and inevbitably that means they are looking to recruit from eastern Europe, Africa and countries such as Chile or Paraguay.
The influx of foreigners has increased markedly since 2006-7 because that’s when Italian football began to suffer the financial impact of the match-fixing scandal, with more and more fans staying away and advertising and sponsorship revenue under threat.
The solution adopted by some clubs, such as Benfica in Portugal, is to invest heavily in developing young players — and to discriminate in favour of homegrown youngsters.
Five years into their new youth programme, Benfica have just four foreign youngsters on their books compared to 74 from the Lisbon area alone. That’s a complete contrast with the first team, which has already fielded 11 foreigners this season.
Will it work? Only a couple of Portuguese lads have come through the youth ranks in five years and they are still fringe players.
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/2ca4c6ciTlE/post.aspx
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