More press

[Handsome_Devil]

https://inews.co.uk/sport/football/m...69?ITO=newsnow

[Handsome_Devil]

And here we are in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/s...d=tw-nytsports

Must admit I'm surprised Ojala needed an appeal process. If that's the case it's no wonder we're taking our time to sign folk if we're trying to reduce the number of speculative punts.

[jwok]

Here's an extract from the NYT article -


Motherwell had to make a case for its signing the Finnish defender Juhani Ojala this summer. The process, a simple one when Britain was a member of the European Union, took weeks.

Britain’s biggest teams face no such hurdles. The current system grants an immediate work permit to any player who has featured in at least 70 percent of competitive games over the last two seasons for any one of soccer’s top 50 national teams. That means any player who has also been a regular for a successful club team in one of Europe’s better leagues is almost certain to be given a pass — or, to use the technical term, a Governing Body Endorsement. It is in these rich waters that clubs in the Premier League tend to do much of their fishing.

In Scotland, though, only the country’s two dominant clubs, Rangers and Celtic, can even dream of pursuing players of that quality. The rest of Scotland’s teams tend to shop for bargains, or at least for value, every time the transfer window opens. “It’s clear to me,” Motherwell’s Burrows said, “that we would struggle to get anyone we could afford to sign to 15 points.”

That was certainly the case with Ojala. To Burrows and his team, the defender represented something of a coup: not just a Finnish international, but a player who had on occasion captained his country; a veteran not only of the Danish league but with experience in Switzerland and Russia, too.

But when Motherwell tallied up how many points he was worth, he did not come close to the requirements.

“The Danish league is ranked in the fifth band of six by the Home Office,” Burrows said. “He got a couple of points there. We got a couple more for what his salary would be in relation to the league average. But his team had finished fourth from bottom in Denmark. It had not played in Europe. He had not played enough international games.” Ojala’s application, in the end, only mustered eight points.

This is where the bureaucracy came in. Clubs in Scotland, at the moment, have access to an appeal system. They can apply to the Scottish Football Association for an exemption, making an appointment to press their case as to why a player who has fallen short would still be a worthwhile signing.

That, though, is only the first step. If the authorities grant a Governing Body Endorsement on appeal, the player — assisted by the club — must then apply for a work visa: filling in an online form, followed by booking a biometrics appointment at a visa application center, run by a number of outside companies to whom the job has been outsourced by the British government. Only once that is complete is the player granted a visa, and the transfer signed off by the government.