Soccer Nativism Redux

I am reading a great book entitled Gaming the World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture whose central theme is that global sports culture simultaneously breaks down international barriers and intensifies local identities.  Nowhere is this more present than global soccer culture.  And yet, the globalized nature of soccer also presents some with nativist feelings.  This story, linked via a Fox Soccer tweet, concludes:

A study of 534 top-tier European football clubs says more foreign players are being used, causing homegrown youngsters to be neglected.

Neglected is such a strong, pejorative term.  It gives one the idea that these homegrown players are just languishing on the sidelines, never getting any playing time and their desire to play soccer withering with each passing day.  Then a few sentences later we find this explanation:

Nearly half of top-tier players across 36 countries have transferred internationally at least once.

The reality is that there are two halves to this story.  For every door closed on a homegrown player's squad, there are 533 other top tier European teams that have open doors and even more outside of UEFA.  This reality plays out in the EPL, and I've worked with the Transfer Price Index to prove it's been accelerating since the Boseman ruling.  If Fox Soccer wants to argue that we need to go back to a time when soccer players rights to free and fair wages and contracts were being violated, they're free to make that argument.  I would point out that teams were being far more neglectful in blocking players rights than they are in not guaranteeing first team spots for homegrown players.  Would Robin Van Persie have been better served if he had just stayed at Feyenoord instead of testing his wares at the global club that is Arsenal (financially or skill-wise)?  That's the logic extended by an article that theorizes that "home grown players are being neglected".

Ultimately, the EPL and other UEFA leagues are demonstrating what I observed in the blog post that commented on the post-Bosman transfer behavior:

In many regards, the Premier League is a microcosm of the increasingly globalized world it operates within: greater international ownership and investment, greater employee mobility, fewer employees staying with a single firm from “graduation” to retirement, and increased dominance by a few brands within the marketplace.

I wouldn't be an Arsenal fan if I couldn't see them on TV nearly every week.  I wouldn't even be aware of them.  They wouldn't be on US TV if they weren't a global enterprise, in a global league, constantly displaying the talents of the best players in the globe.  The reality is that soccer is a global business, and the Inter Milan Champions League winner referenced in the Fox Soccer story is a perfect example of this.

Nativism is often a sick nostalgia that is in reaction to a "foreign" cultural presence.  I call it a sick nostalgia, because it often remembers history as better than it was.  Does any fan of the EPL, outside of die-hard England-first fans, seriously believe that the best years of the league are in the older stadiums, less dynamic teams, and English-centric rosters of yesteryear?

If the concern is that a lack of homegrown players will kill the youth game, I would encourage anyone to look at the youth game in the United States where our professional league has only been in existence for 15 years.  In compiling the advantages that soccer has in the global sports arena, the authors of Gaming the World provide the perfect response to this line of thought:

To this day, soccer never developed the numerical intricacies and statistical measures that became essential to a proper understanding of cricket and baseball, and to a lesser extent football and the rugby games.  There are no box scores in soccer.  Virtually any person in any culture can quickly understand the game's aims and thus its purpose and process.

The professional game involves a lot of money, and certainly a lot of statistics - those statistics are the sole reason for this blog.  At it's most basic form, however, soccer is just how Gaming the World describes it.  Kids everywhere can pick up the game to varying degrees, and there is no shortage of those who dream of a pro career.  Those dreams involve Africans coming to America to play for the Sounders, Americans going to England to play in the Merseyside Derby, and French managers starting their international careers in Japan and making themselves a legend at an English club.  These players and managers dream internationally because the game is international.  There is no putting the genie back in the bottle, and the soccer world is better for it.