The Premier League After Brexit: were the doom mongers right?

The Premier League After Brexit: were the doom mongers right?

There were some (and yes I was very much one of them) who predicted in the immediate aftermath of the referendum in the UK, that the Premier League would suffer as a result.

My argument was that the PL has built its reputation on two platforms. One, having access to the best players in Europe through the EU, and two through having the sort of competitive league that Spain, Germany and France can only dream about.


Whereas in Spain the fourth placed team is normally closer to relegation than winning the title, in Germany there is a rule that says Bayern Munich win the league at least every other year, and in France PSG win the title by Christmas, in England we have Man U, Man C, Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea who all have hopes, plus Liverpool who expect to return to challenging and Leicester who confounded everyone. Seven clubs in that list and another seven who on their day can upset any of them.

Brexit-FlagThe first of those two points (having the best players) comes of course primarily from EU membership. But because the powerbase of the PL has grown so strong, it has become an important part of the British economy, earning huge amounts of foreign revenue for Britain, players from across the world can get visas to enter the country.

As a result of all this despite the best efforts of some to make it otherwise, the rules about allowing non-EU citizens into the Premier League have been lax.

However the FA, who have now been given control over who can and who can’t get a visa has a policy of “more English players playing in the Premier League” and is trying to make visas harder to get. If the worldwide excitement in the PL declines, then that will help the FA bolster its justification for turning down visas.

If we remember that a lot of players from South America get into the Premier League by first getting EU citizenship following a two year residency in Spain or Portugal, and that this entry will also be removed post Brexit, then the number of foreign players who play for the top Premier League teams will quite simply, decline steeply.

At least, that was my thinking just after the referendum. But now there is another scenario that springs to mind…

There is a phrase among commentators on such matters that economic forecasting only exists in order to give astrologers a good name. And the reason economic forecasters get things so wrong so much of the time is because the economics of a country are not just the result of money matters. The economic affairs of a nation is also affected by all sorts of other things such as (to take one example) political maneuvering – and boy have we just seen some political maneuvering!

Could anyone have predicted on June 23 that the Prime Minister would resign, that suddenly Boris Johnson would drop out of the race to be the replacement, that he would be betrayed by his chum, the renegade hobbit (or Michael Gove as he is sometimes known), that Theresa May’s one remaining opponent would shoot herself in the face with her first newspaper interview, and that as a PM May would then appoint the Three Brexiteers as the people to handle Britain’s foreign policy?

If you did, then I suggest you give up the day job and become a tipster.

And anyway all that is just the start. For there is something else going on, something that (unless you read the international press) you might not have noticed.

Part of the Brexit campaign was that once Britain voted to Leave, then many other countries that had powerful Leave parties would all rise up, Leave votes would happen everywhere, the EU would crumble, and Europe would quickly give the UK every trade deal it asked for just to try and hold the economic side of the Union together.

Except that the opposite happened. The Leave parties in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Austria etc etc are seeing their positions slip away, and not just by a few percentage points. They are being hammered. Indeed the Leave campaign in Austria has disintegrated to such an extent that the party most associated with it has now said it doesn’t want Leave at all.

So what next for Europe, and what next for the Premier League?

At the moment I write this we are in the aftermath of the Nice atrocity and trying to work out what is going on in Turkey where the tragic events have led to unforgivable and incomprehensible bloodshed. Not football or economic matters, but still appalling and awful situations which we have to try and take into account if working out “What Next?”

I am going give you a prediction, quite probably just so that you can laugh your head off as you contemplate the lunacy of what I am about to say. But do remember, if I am right, I am going to come back and quote this piece in every subsequent piece I write for the rest of my life.

Many commentators have suggested that Prime Minister May has picked the pro-Brexit group and told them to get on with the job of negotiating for two reasons. One is to get them out of the way, and the other is because she believes, just as many of us believe, is that no deal along the lines proposed by the Leave campaign is ever going to be possible.

When you remember that the EU/Canada trade deal is the one that Britain’s negotiators (the few that we have) are looking at as a model for an EU/UK deal, and recall that it took seven years to negotiate, and it will be another two years before it is implemented, you can imagine that the UK’s economy will be shattered by leaving, and that no one but no one is going to be thinking about the Premier League in all this.

With the FA having its “Premier League for the English” campaign, and controlling immigration for footballers, decline and fall looms for the Premier League, as it does for a lot of other matters that depends on trade with the rest of the world.

Except for one thing.

Theresa May voted Remain. She isn’t going to allow this to fall apart and be known as the UK Prime Minister who oversaw the biggest collapse in the British economy since 1932. David Cameron will be forever known as the man who misjudged the public mood and the power of Ukip and gave Britain the referendum. Mrs May intends to be known as the woman who rescued us from oblivion.

My guess is this. From the moment in which Article 50 is triggered the UK has two years to get its trade deals done. Secure in the knowledge that the EU is not falling apart but is secure, and with a lot of the world laughing at a country that could put the man, Boris Johnson who published the Spectator (which had a column which regularly called African nations Bongo Bongo Land) and who called Hillary Clinton “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital, as the Foreign Secretary, the PM will step in and say, “OK the Brexiteers have had their chance and have failed. I will now save the country.”

We have already seen how quickly she can get rid of those she doesn’t like and the Brexiteers will be removed as failures. She will then ask the EU for a Norway style solution, which among everything else has Norway outside the EU (so the will of the people is recognised), but having a total trade deal with the EU in return for accepting all the “four freedoms” – the freedom of movement of goods, capital, services and people.

She will then claim that immigration is controlled because of her predecessor’s deal with the EU just before the referendum and we now have a secure economy.

Thus we will leave the EU, but still have free movement of people, and the Premier League will remain as it is. And I think Mrs May will win the next General Election on the back of that. And although I won’t ever vote for her party I will admire the way she has done it.

Of course I might be quite wrong. But if I am then I can only foresee decline for the PL which will rapidly return to the days of the 1970s; an irrelevant backwater which has little to offer world television audiences and which cuts itself off from foreign football.

Come back in two years and we can see if I was right.

Contributed by Tony Attwood and also subsequently Published on ChelseaNews.com and ManUNews.com

You can read the first Brexit article here http://goonernews.com/blog/what-will-the-premier-league-be-like-once-britain-pulls-out-of-the-eu/

You also can read more about what Arsene Wenger had to say about the ramifications of Brexit in Niven Marston’s article Wenger Fears Brexit Consequences