The foreigner limit is the worst thing that ever happened to Russian football and it completely destroyed Russian national team. And honestly, Russian premier league is a pretty bad reference point for competitiveness since most Russian football clubs still heavily rely on state financing which completely eliminates any need to be profitable or to run clubs as a business.
Also, Gaich was loaned out not because CSKA couldn’t afford him. He was just utter shit
Yes, they couldn't afford to keep him on the roster, not to pay him. Having him around meant that they were missing out on the chance to have a better/more suitable player in his stead. ie if he was still around, getting a foreign quota, the team would be worse off.
The foreigners limit did not "happen" to Russian football, it was always there. Not sure what you're referring to. All leagues had a 3-5 foreigners rule until 1996 and then it became 3 to 5 non-EU spots for European teams, but gradually for some.
Italy actually has one of the strictest rules on non-EU players.
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I'm not sure what the right number of people per team to pick, clearly its not 20 (e.g. the top 20 players wont all be at United, a number of them would start elsewhere), but that squad depth at the bottom of the league starts to look really fucking thin quite quickly imho.
There's no problem with that really. It's only an issue for the casual couch potatoes who play video games and will whine about squad building becoming "hard".
What you've done is not wrong or anything, it's just hypothetical and the reason I won't go further is because you could come up with tons of assumptions and examples, so it's just clash of creativity to that point.
But what is not, is with everyone else. You focused on the domestic players, but instead you should have focused on the foreigners.
Back to the Manchester City example that I started, I will just assume that the 5 players that Guardiola would have kept are:
Kevin De Bruyne
Bernardo Silva
Ilkay Gundogan
Ederson
Ruben Dias
and for whatever it's worth, I'll assume that Aguero holds a British passport after all those years, so he gets to stick around.
This means that the following players could not play for Manchester City this season: Joao Cancelo, Aymeric Laporte, Oleg Zinchenko, Gabriel Jesus, Riyad Mahrez, Nathan Ake, Ferran Torres, Benjamin Mendy, Zack Steffen, Rodri, Eric Garcia, Fernandinho, Philippe Sandler.
Where do these players go? Assuming that some of them want to be in the PL and are better than the foreigners that teams will be keeping, you could assume that a player like Mahrez, Rodri and Cancelo could find a job at Arsenal o Tottenham. But they'd either settle for a midtable club, move to their country to play for a top club, or move to a lesser league for a strong team there. The first option makes the league stronger, the second option makes their national league stronger and the third one makes European competitions stronger. As a result, staying at Manchester City just makes Manchester City stronger. And since this is the new norm and what I'm talking about is actually the vast majority of football history, this is just a return to normality, rather than something radical. We are currently living in the radical.
And sure, Manchester City would look to sign better English/British players. And they'd probably sign some. But they wouldn't be able to fill their roster with the England and Wales national team, they'd have 10 players at best perhaps, and only half of those would be starters. Where does this come from? Just look at every roster of World Cup or Euro from WC94 and EU96 and back. Rich clubs isn't something new. Dominant clubs isn't something new. Yet, you didn't see them all the time in Europe, they didn't expect to win every game in their domestic league or in Europe. They went to what now seems like obscure grounds and were happy if they got a draw. That's real parity. And this is the only way to achieve it.
The Dutch team of 1996, when Ajax was dominating Europe, had 8 Ajax players + Seedorf (from the 1995 CL) then at Sampdoria.
The Spanish team of 1994, when Barcelona was dominating Spain, had 9 players from there.
That's as dominant as you can get. When you have teams that can also afford the top guys, then it just diminishes. The only country where this may still be an issue is Germany.