Foreign players were effectively banned before 1978 but, as Matthew Taylor discovers, there were ways for a select few to ply their trade
Before the arrival of Ossie Ardiles and Ricardo Villa at Tottenham in 1978, foreign players were rarely seen on British football pitches. A mixture of xenophobia and sheer arrogance convinced the authorities that there was little need or desire to import players from abroad. The British – mainly the English – clung to an assumed role as footballing masters who had nothing to learn from their continental pupils, especially on home soil. Even so, the British game was never completely insulated from the outside. The place of foreigners in our domestic football did not suddenly emerge as an issue in the wake of the Bosman judgment, or even in 1978. There had, in fact, been a trickle of foreign footballers into this country for almost a century before the present flood.
