More bad news from FIFA HQ...

It seems the plan to promote mediocrity was passed "overwhelmingly" by FIFA delegates. The plan is 6+5, limit the number of foreign players in your football team to 5. One of the reasons why apparently this was a good thing was that it would help national teams do better, because now their players won't be part of big squads at the best Premiership teams.

But instead, their players will be playing against bit-part players in crummy local leagues, or lower down the English footballing pyramid, if they like the money and the English countryside. How does this help national teams around Europe and the world?

And how do we square the English representative being against it? England is purported to be the team suffering most from foreign influence, having failed to qualify for Euro 2008. Yet it's only a couple of short years since England were touted as one of the favourites (wrongly!) for the World Cup in 2006. How fickle footballing commentators are, and how good it is that (apparently) the English footballing bodies understand a bit of economics.

Economists are overwhelmingly free-trade, as Greg Mankiw points out, for a number of reasons, not just that it gives a country a share of a bigger pie, but also philosophically. And it's pretty implausible that football is somehow immune from this kind of economic analysis. The overall output of English footballers will be greater with foreign competition, in terms of goals/quality football/silverware etc., because they have to produce it to survive. And this will rub off on the national team.

Football is notoriously unpredictable (part of its appeal), and fortunes can change quickly, particularly if badly managed (by an English manager in England's case!), which has more explanatory power for England's current malaise than foreign dominance: England failed to qualify for TWO World Cups in the 1970s, when the number of foreign players in England was minuscule.

As a final aside. The economics department in Oxford is foreign dominated. My masters class had at most 10% of students being English, and the ratio doesn't improve at Ph.D or postdoc (although perhaps slightly when you get to tenured staff). Is that a cause to introduce some idiotic 6+5 rule? Supervisors must have at least 50% of their students being English/domestic?

The quality would fall drastically as the best students from around the world then could not enter Oxford, and supervisors would be forced to take on poorer quality English students. I've benefitted massively from rubbing shoulders with students from all around the world of a very high quality, something that might not otherwise have been the case had UK academia had someone like Sepp Blatter as its figurehead.