Elite Player Performance Plan in Football (EPPP)

On the 20^th October 2011, The Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) was successfully introduced to the Football League, receiving a majority 46 votes from the 72 Football League managers.  Almost everybody related to the Football League has labelled this as “the end of the Football League as we know it” or “destroying the lower leagues”, but who really knows what the outcome of this will be?

As many of you will know, the Premier League have enforced the rulings so that the best young English talent can be purchased for a far cheaper fee than previous, with the aim to improve the amount of elite English footballers playing in the top-flight.  Furthermore, The Premier League were reported to have told the remaining seventy-two Football League clubs that if they did not agree to the proposed changes, the annual funding provided to them (approximately £5.4m across four years) would be cut, or even abolished.  Meaning that there was little a club in League One or League Two could realistically do, with finances for many of these clubs already extremely insecure.

I’m sure many of you have seen the facts surrounding the amount of money Premier League clubs will have to pay to land a lower league starlet and I want to discuss whether this plan is really going to benefit the nation.

Firstly, The Premier League wants to develop the youth of England and they plan to do this by persuading top clubs to increase their youth recruitment from England, instead of looking to sign players from abroad for a far cheaper sum – but is this really going to change the development of the youth players?  I personally believe that the introduction of a rule where there must be a minimum of five home-grown players in a Premier League team’s starting line-up would be far more beneficial.  If these players are going to become “elite”, then surely they need to be playing at an elite level, as opposed to gaining their experience through being loaned to teams at a lower level.  Maybe five would be too much at first, but I believe that would be a far better route.

The introduction of the plan also saw the lifting of the “90 minute law” – where a team could only sign a youth player if the travelling distance to the club was 90 minutes or less.  I believe this will be a logical improvement, mostly due to the fact that a team such as Newcastle have part of their catchment area based in the North Sea.

It has been said that the plan will provide a much more constant cash flow for lower league football clubs and this could well be a positive with many clubs struggling with the day-to-day running costs.  However, it will also cut down a potential mass income through creating a raw talent and selling on for a high transfer fee, such as Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain this summer for £12m.  This can obviously create a whole host of opportunities for a club, but will lower league clubs want to continue investing in youth systems if they aren’t going to achieve these big sums, even if they may be once in a blue moon for most?  Not to mention the potential of developing players who turn into instrumental first-team players – how will clubs replace these players in future if there is a lack of internal investment in youth players?

Everyone is likely to have different views on this matter.  Fans of Premier League outfits are likely to see this as a positive move and fans of the remaining seventy-two clubs will probably see this as having a negative impact.  Personally, I feel that the plan has a lot of potential but has an awful amount of flaws.  I do not believe the plan in its current state will be able to change the amount of “elite” English footballers coming through English football.  Teams in the Premiership will continue to purchase cheaper foreign players who have a marginally better skill level than the youngsters and this will continue to cut out opportunities for youth players to gain experience at an “elite level”.  I feel the only way this can be enforced is the introduction of the rule I mentioned earlier, with a minimum of five home-grown English players in the match-day squad.  Unless there are changes made to this plan, I feel we could see a far wider gap developing between the top division and the lower leagues – which would be a real shame, considering England has always boasted one of the most competitive Football League structures in the world.

@Rich__Norton