The best thing about Brexit is that it offers an occasion to summon the delightful noun “portmanteau,” a word that blends the sounds and combines the meanings of two other words.
Mostly, though, “Brexit”—for “British exit,” the United Kingdom’s pending withdrawal from the European Union—feels thoroughly unpleasant. It has been characterized by some experts as the worst step backward for Europe and Western civilization since the end of World War II. Economically. Socially. Ethnically. Even—and this caught my attention as a veteran of sports journalism—athletically.
A major aspect to Brexit is its proponents’ expectations of British control over immigration. And that translates to the likely loss of foreign superstars who have been so essential to the English Premier League’s status as the world’s best in soccer. The subsequent retreat in the game’s quality, and the resulting dent in its commercial appeal, are why all 20 Premier League clubs were against the Brexit referendum passed in 2016.
In a Forbes listing of the Premier League’s best 10 players last season, only two were Englishmen. According to the BBC, a Brexit-imposed work permit requirement for non-UK workers would eliminate almost 60 percent of the league’s current roster players.
That could take English soccer back more than two decades, to when a quota system limited UK teams to three foreign players. Back then, many of the sport’s cognoscenti were becoming convinced that the increasingly insular nature of the English game made it boring. It was mostly hopeful long balls launched downfield—“pigeon racing,” it was dismissively labeled—and not much else.
Such an approach, by-passing the midfield as defenders send balls over the top toward a clinical, physically imposing striker, still is particularly associated with the English. It does have its adherents, though they are in danger of being accused of being old school. I recall this argument from Jack Charlton, a member of England’s last World Cup champion in 1966, when he used the strategy to coach the first Irish team to qualify for the World Cup in 1990.
“Play in [the opponents’] half of the field,” Charlton said. “Endeavor every time to get the ball behind people. Get the buggers turning, turning, turning on defense. It drives them crazy. All the fanciest, classiest, ‘possession football’ in the world is no substitute for getting the ball behind the defense and playing merry hell with them when they’re facing the wrong way.”
But, since that ’66 English world title, Germany has won the Cup three times with a relentless efficiency emphasizing shifting player roles; Italy has won twice with its defensively oriented, counter-attacking catenaccio; Brazil three times with its creative, fast-flowing brand sometimes equated to dance; Argentina twice with individual skills and speed; Spain once with grounded, quick-touch passing—the fancy, classy, possession football Charlton believed to be no substitute for long ball.
These “national styles” are generalizations, of course, and generalizations are dangerously unreliable. What is difficult to argue against is that a broader talent pool will make a sport, and every team, better. Though there were grumbles from the xenophobic French fringe last summer that the country’s 2018 World Cup team was more African than European, stocked with sons of immigrants from the Congo, Senegal, Morocco, Mali and Cameroon, the bottom line was that France won the title. Viva la difference, n’est-ce pas?
Soccer teams, posited a 2014 Washington Post series, “may accrue additional benefits when their players differ in the way they interpret problems and use their skills to solve them,” and that “this variation likely stems from their exposure to different training methods and styles of play” that undeniably differ from country to country.
An opinion piece in the New York Times by a political journalist based in London argued that Brexit is “the most boring important story in the world” right now. Sticking strictly to the less significant aspect of soccer, I am rooting for unrestricted travel of players that assures a continued diversity in the game—an antidote to boredom. Some fancy, classy, possession football mixed in with the pigeon racing. Describing such a soccer style would necessitate a portmanteau: Spanglish.