(43) The Impact Foreign Players Have on Club Performance in the English Premier League

     The Bosman Case, implemented in 1996, changed the number of foreign players allowed on an English Premier League club’s roster, ultimately creating an open labor market for the football industry. Existing literature... [ view full abstract ]

     The Bosman Case, implemented in 1996, changed the number of foreign players allowed on an English Premier League club’s roster, ultimately creating an open labor market for the football industry. Existing literature documents the constant debate on whether the Bosman case gives the more financially stable clubs an unfair advantage in performance. With the abolishment of transfer policies, the Premier League saw an almost immediate spike in the number of international footballers wanting to play in England. While the talent and quality of English football continue to increase, English supporters believe ‘home-grown’ players are being overlooked and thus lack the professional experience needed to qualify for the next level of play. For this reason, many fans do not support the precedent set by the Bosman Case despite the overall quality of play continuing to exceed expectations. 

     This paper uses empirical modeling with and without a fixed effect to evaluate the impact foreign players in the English Premier League have on a club’s overall performance using financial and roster data from various websites to cross-check. The panel data looks at 37 different clubs between the 1997 to 2007 seasons. I find that the number of foreign players does not significantly affect a team’s performance but other factors, such as financial resources do. The majority of the significance of these results comes from non-fixed effect regressions not accounting for the unobserved heterogeneity across clubs. The fixed effect results are not statistically significant concluding that foreign players have minimal impact on performance for clubs in the English Premier League.