Post-Brexit Arsenal may find themselves in a relegation battle…

30th February, 2021

In an effort to curtail the steady flow of undesirables into a decidedly fragile English society – the post-no-deal-Brexit Immigration Police painted themselves into an unfortunate corner.

Their Zero-Tolerance immigration policy meant that the Premier League could only use English players. Foreign players didn’t satisfy the Nigel Farage Only-Seventh-Generation-Brits-Are-Actual-Brits Law, which President Boris Johnson signed into law shortly after his snap election in late 2019. The few that did pass the 7thGenTest didn’t pass the British Empirical Pantone Skintone Acceptancy Test, being a few shades darker than the Clearly Immigrant (Pantone 20-5000 ®) cut-off chip.

Pre-no-deal-Brexit Premier League clubs had plenty of opportunities to prepare for the cataclysmic end of what used to be the World’s Richest and Most Competitive League™ but they, like everyone else, had their heads buried deep in their comforting dark denial tubes.

2016’s Leavers bemoaned the lack of home-grown players in the English Premier League – even though the Football Association had tried to incentivize and even legislate their inclusion. Arsenal was one of the biggest culprits when it came to fielding teams made up entirely of foreigners, although the dubious honour of starting the first team without a single British player fell to Chelsea, under manager Giancluca Vialli, against Southampton on Boxing Day 1999.

Was it a fault of the English youth-training academy system that pre-Brexit England’s top footballers seemed to be not very English-speaking? In 2018-19 the Premier League had twenty 25-man squads. Of those 500 players, 337 were foreign – that’s 67.4%. In Germany’s Bundesliga, only 278 of their 518 players (53.7%) heiled from elsewhere; in France’s Ligue 1, that figure was 47.6%. In Spain, only 200/476 LaLiga players no habla-ed Español – a measly 42.0%.

Nah. The kids were alright. It was the money, honey.

The billions of Pounds that poured into England’s Premier League between 1992 and 2019 made it a global spectacle, with an ever-growing global audience – and an army of agents, lawyers, managers and players stormed Blighty, all eager to chow that cash cow. 2021’s TV Guide confirms that there is nary an English game to be found on the tube…

Celebrating dodging the Brexit Bullet

The audience followed the Pogbas, Agueros and Sanchezes to more verdant pastures once England’s foreign players found their contracts voided.

And unfortunately the Rashfords, Sterlings and Kanes found themselves climbing higher and higher into their family trees, looking for European ancestors so that they could follow the money into the more lucrative European Superleague – from which England was excluded in 2020 for humanitarian reasons.

No-deal-Brexit was like that scene in Monty Python’s “Holy Grail”, where Lancelot attacks Swamp Castle to free the princess – it lured everyone into a stupor and then shafted them royally.

But the writing was on the wall – and the writing said:

“DON’T WORRY! THIS WON’T HURT! TRUST ME, I’M A DOCTOR”

Although it turned out that there was plenty to worry about.      That it did hurt.       (A lot.)         And the only doctoring going on was of the facts, stats, projections and elections relating to the whole sad Brexit affair.       (And when I say ‘affair’, I don’t mean one of those good affairs where you purge your horniness from your system by having secret sex with the au pair until you realize how much you actually love your wife and miss home cooking and speaking English, and return to your marital bed as a more caring, contrite and cunnilingually-skilled version of your pre-affair self.)

The writing on the wall I’m referring to is – of course – the

What If Only Goals By English Players Counted In The English Premier League table

(WIOGBEPCITEPL).

2017-18 If only goals by English players counted

The WIOGBEPCITEPL table from 2003-04 (Arsenal’s “Invincible” season) read very differently, had anyone bothered to actually read it: the Gunners would have found themselves languishing in the mid-bottom half of the table instead of worshipping their special-issue, one-of-a-kind, gold Premier League trophy. I mean Arséne Wenger’s special-issue, one-of-a-kind, gold, resignation gift:

2003-04 Arsenals Not-actually-so-Invincible-after-all Season

Point is: the WIOGBEPCITEPLtable would have been a canary in the coal-mine for the Clubs who suffered most when “Brexit: No Big F-ing Deal” became “Big F-ing No Deal Brexit”; Clubs like Arsenal – especially Arsenal! – could have prepared for, or even averted the shock of relegation by hiring more English players, instead of letting them all go for free – or close-to-free, and spending so much on players with umlauted or Scrabble-record-breaking last names…

If only I could go back in time and warn them that Brexit Only Wrecks It when it comes to the Premier League…

If only.

—

Thanks to Sports Mole for the idea.

invinciblog

I was eleven-and-a-half. My family had just emigrated from Rhodesia to South Africa. All the kids on my street supported United or Liverpool, because of their Southern African goalkeeper connections: Bailey for United and Grobbelaar for ‘Pool. Problem was: I didn’t like the colour red – so when FA Cup Final day came around in 1979, I supported the team in yellow, even though their name sounded like “Asshole”. At the final whistle, I had bragging rights and a team that had won my heart.

Then I discovered that the Gunners also wore red. Luckily, I remained loyal, and the Arsenal has kicked my heart around ever since… (apart from a few lost years in the ’90s and early ’00s, when I was busy doing grownup things as a composer in Hollywood).

Abandoned invinciblog.com to launch this site with 1 Nil Down 2 One Up blogfather Dave Seager – and we have used this platform to help launch the writing careers of a number of amazing Arsenal bloggers.