Premier league in Europe.

They are taking players from a province that isn't recognised by anyone as a country.
..........................................

Neither is Wales, countries do their national diplomacy with Britain, Britain has a seat at the UN. For all extents and purposes Wales pretty much is a province and nobody recognises it as an independant country...

The only real difference is it has an FA....

But from a footballing perspective it's recognised as a country whereas Catalonia isn't.

You are fixating on population. I'm looking at it from the point of view that an English club was allowed to use players from different countries whereas Spain, Italy and Germany were not.
==========================================================
I'm fixating on population because that's the only thing that gives anybody an advantage...the size of the talent pool you're choosing from.

So do you think that Europe's Ryder Cup team has an advantage over the US Ryder Cup team, because it can choose from different countries?

And that it would be much more evenly balanced if the US Ryder Cup team played the UK, like it used to?

comment by Darren The King Fletcher (U10026)
posted 4 minutes ago
But from a footballing perspective it's recognised as a country whereas Catalonia isn't.



----------------------------------------------------------------------


Not saying its an advantage or disadvantage either way I just think its a very grey area and I can see the logic in arguments either way.

Well then we should have been allowed to use loads of players from France as well as Russia has a much bigger populations.

The Ryder Cup has no relevance to European competition in football.

We did have a British team in the Olympics.....

SAF, fair enough, but the way I see it is that every other country had to pick players from their own national FA whereas English teams could bend those rules.

They changed the rules and it affect us, as I'm sure you'll remember the conundrums we had with the three foreign player rule in the early years.

We can talk about populations all we like. But I don't think it can be argued that the English sides didn't benefit from being able to choose from the whole of the UK.

Well then we should have been allowed to use loads of players from France as well as Russia has a much bigger population.
==========================================================
Larger countries do have an advantage, yes.
Whether we want to merge different countries to even it all out is another question, but it's an administrative one.

Britain was allowed to do it because the Union forms to create another entity anyway. Nobody had an English Passport, they had a British Passport, (and some in FIFA thought that the UK should not have been allowed to have different national teams within that entity).

But that's just an administrative question, it doesn't give you a footballing advantage. If Bavaria had broken away from West Germany, but West German teams had still been allowed to count them as nationals, what is the footballing advantage it would have given them?

Would the Bavarian players all have become better players overnight?

No they would have had a larger pool to choose from than they should have.

European football competition is competed between different footballing associations.

Spanish clubs were only allowed to pick players from one association, English clubs were allowed to pick from four.

Whatever spin you want to put on it that gives English sides an advantage. Whether or not it's as big an advantage as having a larger population within your own footballing administration is beside the point. English clubs got an adiministrative advantage nobody else did (I can't remember if the Soviet countries had the same advantage).

English clubs got an adiministrative advantage nobody else did
==========================================================
Well, maybe, but an administrative advantage is no good to you on the pitch.

But even that's debatable anyway. FIFA regarded the UK as the state, and has long argued that allowing separate FA's within that state was a concession (which they've threatened to withdraw, on occasion).

So in footballing administration terms, it's arguable that it was allowing separate FA's that was the concession, and not the unified transfer market.

============================================================
Whatever spin you want to put on it
============================================================
Well, it's not really spin, is it? In terms of footballing advantage (as opposed to administrative advantage), it's the size of the talent-pool you can choose from which makes the difference (along with a couple of other things, not relevant to this debate).