cfdh_edmundo
Maverick
- 30 December 2002
That’s sort of true, but it’s in the context of a wider rule about work permits. Work permits are needed for some foreigners to legally work in the UK. The first thing to say is that only non-EU* citizens need to have a work permit, so any player from inside the EU can play for a UK club, and also say a Brazilian player who has an Italian passport could also play without needing a permit since he has Italian parentage he’s eligable for EU citizenship and so doesn’t need a work permit.
However any other nationality (Russian, Ukraine, Croatia [until it joins EU], Egypt, Argentina, USA, Australia etc) will need a work permit to play at a club in the UK. The criteria is based on many factors, such as age, perceived talent and number of games played for a national team does count. There isn’t a set ratio, but if a player has played over 2/3rd of matches for his country in the last year (or two years) then the buying club will use this as a claim that the player is a special talent and should be granted a permit, and usually they’ll get the permit – as happened with this week’s transfer of Pogrebnyak to Reading. If the player hasn’t played that many matches, then special circumstances e.g. player being young (and playing in u21s instead), player being out of contention due to injury, etc then he may still be granted a permit – however in some big cases players haven’t got the permits (e.g. last summer QPR tried to sign Henrique of Sao Paolo but he didn’t get the permit). There is a lot of ambiguity as to if a player will or won’t get a permit and some questionable ones have in the past had to be loaned out to other EU clubs (e.g. Manucho getting loaned to Panathinikos, Vela getting to loaned to a few Spanish clubs).
*as well as being EU, it’s also EEA (Norway, Iceland) and Switzerland who don’t need work permits.
. Sometimes , its hard to release a contracted player. City will have the same problem. We suffered w/ Bendtner every was shocked, how much he was earning £55k is too much . Adebayor is on 170k how will anyone afford that wages.
