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You couldn't make it up. It made you believe in fate. Mere days after Britain voted to leave the European Union, England was out of Euro 2016. A farce and a Brexit of profound consequence for English soccer.

It's tempting to extrapolate. England's defeat at the hands of little Iceland was English soccer laid bare and exposed for the collective mediocrity it is – a team of English-only players led by an English manager and supported by English-only backroom staff. Every two years since the 2002 World Cup, it seems, I've written about England's failure – the almost foreordained embarrassment of incompetence, lack of technique and all that effort and sweat.

When England exited Euro 2012 in Kiev, at the hands of Italy, I was there and recall the English had precisely one shot on target. I wrote that, as a general rule, England can't pass the ball – there were perhaps three occasions in 120 minutes when a string of passes came together for England – and that Wayne Rooney is overrated.

Same old, same old. But this Brexit thing has implications greater than the national team's predictable exit every two years. The English Premier League is rightly considered the most exciting, most watched and most lucrative league in the world. And now is the time to grasp, fully and completely, that the EPL is the top league in the world precisely because it contains an army of non-English players, managers and support staff.

Like much about Brexit, its impact on the EPL is unclear. But a picture is emerging and scenarios can be created.

When Britain is a non-EU country, the free movement of players and managers from EU countries will inevitably be restricted. If the current regulations about non-EU players are upheld, then some 400 players and other staff from across the tiers of English soccer will fall into a category which requires a work permit. The work permits are assigned on a complex points system based on the FIFA rankings of the player's home country and the player's appearances for his national team.

It's rather like the criteria for a Canadian actor to get a permit to work in television in L.A. The person must prove established skill and experience and be deemed an "exceptional" talent. If such were applied to non-English players in the EPL, the first casualty would be young players from abroad – players who are promising, but not established. They would be barred from English soccer. In the scant material on the potential impact of Brexit on the EPL to date, Cristiano Ronaldo is being cited; it's unlikely Manchester United would have been able to sign him as a teenager in 2003 if Britain wasn't in the EU.

The value of the British pound as a currency will matter, too. A weaker sterling will make it more expensive to pay top players and to do business in Europe – everything from paying scouts to the cost of teams travelling and playing in Europe. That means less money to spend on the club infrastructure back in England.

A worst-case scenario is a slow unravelling of the business which props up the EPL. The EPL clubs are vastly rich thanks to the massive fees paid by broadcasters to televise EPL games worldwide. A diminished EPL, with fewer foreign star players, means the league is less valuable as media content, and less money is paid by broadcasters. Less money from TV rights means less money that clubs have to spend on player development, marketing and everything that happens behind the scenes.

In the way that soccer always unfolds, the players are fetishized figures and craved by supporters of individual teams. But the reality of soccer is far more complex. There is a good reason why there were only three English-born managers in the EPL at the end of last season. Foreign managers have the skills that most English mangers lack – sophistication in tactical planning and execution. They are craftier, more deft in player selection and what they call "man management," and more wily.

And behind each foreign manager is a team of foreign support staff, people who are also experts in areas that English support staff cannot fathom. I can recall an interview with the former Chelsea player and Irish international Damien Duff. He had spent most of his career at Blackburn Rovers and was brought to Chelsea by Claudio Ranieri, who now manages the EPL champion, Leicester City. Duff had been plagued by hamstring injuries at Blackburn. He explained that everything changed at Chelsea.

His story involved Ranieri putting him in the care of Italian physios and others at Chelsea. According to Duff, they taught him how to walk and run in a way that would ensure his hamstring problems would not recur. What Duff emphasized is that the treatment was revolutionary and streets ahead of what he received at Blackburn. Also, it worked.

English soccer might be isolated from those skills and unable to hire those experts in the eventual fallout from the Brexit. No one can foresee the impact now, but change is coming.

When the first results of the Brexit referendum were trickling in last Thursday night, early voting counts from Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough indicated which way the country would go. Newcastle voted to remain in the EU, but only by a tiny margin. Sunderland and Middlesbrough voted to leave the EU. To any soccer fan watching, there was an eerie significance – Newcastle, Sunderland and Middlesbrough are at the heart of English soccer. Those clubs are longstanding, venerated and at the centre of their communities.

It's possible that voters in those communities were motivated by xenophobic dislike of foreigners and migrants. It's possible that in taking that stance, they failed to see the potential impact on their cherished local teams.

And it is possible that the worst-case scenario for English soccer, after Brexit, is a league and a system as mediocre as the English national team that went down to Iceland. Sometimes, you really need foreign skills, and the EPL depends on it.

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