Very recently, ex-Aston Villa player and overall seemingly pretty awesome guy Stiliyan Petrov did an hour-long interview with Tribuna Levski, the main YouTube fan channel of Levski Sofia. Petrov was there as a representative of Dimitar Berbatov’s group, which aims to replace the extremely poor current administration of the Bulgarian Football Union (BFS). The interview mostly contained a lot of extremely valid criticisms toward the BFS. There were quite a few reasonable questions raised, and slightly concerningly, to me at least, there were very few specific answers regarding how this hypothetical new administration of the BFS would revitalize Bulgarian football. Some of the few satisfying answers were that the hypothetical new BFS would take special care to make sure football clubs are fully aware of all the already existing opportunities for state financing and a term limit to avoid repeating the current case of an extremely rotten administration making sure that they are in power indefinitely. 

A, to me very worrisome idea was the one that was discussed the most, as well as the one that received the most media coverage. The “luxury tax”. Disclaimer: Although I disagree with the idea of the tax being a good idea, I still support a change in the management of the BFS. Currently, the most important thing for us to be able to make any progress is to remove Bobby Mihailov and his gang of drunks from power. If that requires placing Berbatov in charge, I am all for it.

The problem: Bulgarian football players are at a very low level compared to the rest of the world in relation to where they were a few decades ago and in relation to how good we should expect them to be. We have no players playing in any of Europe’s top 5 leagues, which is considerably worse than even 10 years ago, when we had players like Berbatov, Petrov and Bozhinov among others. The national team is in a constant state of decline, despite many coaches saying that “we did poorly, but we are on the up” after every failed qualification.

The alleged causes:

- Poor academies - In Bulgaria, many teams have academies pretty much out of necessity due to regulation. The only objective of many is not to export good-quality young players but rather to be self-sustaining through the costs parents pay. The coaches are corrupt, there is no discipline, and academies have too many teams of the same age group for maximum profit. Parents often bribe coaches for their children to get playing minutes in place of potentially more driven and talented ones. Personally, I entirely agree with this.

- Professional teams using too many foreigners: Petrov alleges that Bulgarian talents are unable to grow in many local teams due to said teams often buying up too many foreigners. No examples were directly given, but some of the main culprits here include the top 2 teams from the last few years, Ludogorets and CSKA - Sofia. Both typically field between 1 and 2 Bulgarians per game, instead opting for more proven players from all over the rest of the world. Culprits also include midtable Beroe, who often play with no Bulgarians in their starting 11. All this is obviously a problem, but I would later argue that it is not necessarily the cause of our not having that many exceptional players, more so as a consequence of the academy issue.

Luxury tax:

This is where this so-called “Luxury tax” comes in. It is to be used as a way to mitigate the issue of playing too few Bulgarians in our league. In practice, this is a tax that will be applied to every foreign player over an unspecified number of foreign players. The money received from this tax will be spread across “teams that facilitate the development of young Bulgarian talent”. Sounds great, right? We can force Ludogorets CSKA-Sofia and Beroe to play with more Bulgarians to develop great footballers for our national team while also financing smaller, poorer clubs with a large focus on young talent like Pirin Blagoevgrad. Well, let me tell you why I, a recent computer science graduate with no experience managing Bulgarian football, think this is a terrible idea.

The best players in the league are foreigners:

• Best player in Ludogorets-Tekpetey - not Bulgarian
• Best player in CSKA-Sofia-Heintz - not Bulgarian
• Best player in Cherno More-Popov - Bulgarian
• Best player in Loko Plovdiv-Giovanny not Bulgarian
• Best player in Levski - Welton - not Bulgarian
• Best player in Arda - Not sure, but he’s probably Bulgarian

These are all top teams, and the crown jewel of most of them is some extremely motivated foreigner who was bought in for relatively cheap, gets paid relatively cheap (ok, the Ludogorets and CSKA-Sofia ones likely get paid very well), and ended up becoming the best player over time with the help of their academy background.

The Luxury Tax would increase the price clubs would have to pay for ALL foreigners, not just those over the threshold.

The explanation for this is pretty simple. If the limit for free foreigners is 6 and you get a seventh one, it’s not just the seventh foreigner that is contributing toward what you have to pay. It’s all of your players. After all, if you get rid of one of the others, you don’t have to pay the tax for the seventh anymore. This means that the desirability of all foreigners is reduced. That way, we’re eliminating some of the potential best players in the league, further reducing the strength of Bulgarian clubs. Of course, the idea is to compensate by developing more high-potential Bulgarians, but unfortunately, before we fix the major academy problem, such talent, which has not already been ruined, is not widely available.

Demand for Bulgarian players will increase, causing their prices to artificially rise, pricing out non-top clubs:

If suddenly Ludogorets and CSKA-Sofia suddenly start needing to have at least 7 Bulgarians in their starting squads, this means that, to stay competitive, let alone remain the best two teams, they would need to find good Bulgarian players. With the current academy system (so also not within the next 5 years, even if we magically fix all academy problems instantly), this will mainly not be academy players, but rather somewhat proven players poached from other clubs. As there will be so much new demand, teams will have to increase Bulgarian players’ salaries. Since no one can offer salaries as high as Ludogorets and CSKA-Sofia, a lot of native players will inevitably get poached Bayern Munich style. Ludogorets is already doing that with the current situation, and the Luxury Tax could only make it worse. 

The weaker teams get weaker:

With the sudden reduction of available quality Bulgarian players and with their price rise, less financially powerful clubs will become unable to hold on to them or buy them. Luring in more foreigners is not an option because of the tax. As such, these teams will have to rely on weaker academy players, and while yes, this is, in theory, good for our football, it would also make weaker teams weaker and reduce league competitiveness significantly. And yes, the proceeds of the Luxury tax are supposed to go to these sorts of teams with more academy players. Hypothetically, this could allow for the academies to eventually become better, thus making the teams better. Said academy players would still get sponged up by the big clubs, though.

The narrative that currently “young Bulgarians are not given a chance”. 

This is a very common talking point for both the drunks that comprise the current BFS, as well as  national team coaches of many age groups and Berbatov’s group. It’s at the core of the idea of a “Luxury tax”. In my humble opinion, this idea, aside from the two teams at the very top of the table, is absolute bullcrap. Except for the top two teams and a few others, every Bulgarian team has a very decent amount of young or even second-team Bulgarian players waiting for a chance. During a season of Bulgarian football, there are a ton of teams with low squad depth and rotations. As a result, a lot of young players who train with the good, experienced players end up playing by necessity.

To give an extremely recent example, two days ago, Levski (4th last year) just played a 17-year-old for 90 minutes and subbed in two more 17-year-olds. Said tactical maneuver was almost unavoidable, as there was literally no one else who could play. One of the issues was that two of our starters (18 and 21) played for the U21 national team a day prior. Did I mention that our keeper, who starts every game, is 18 years old? We are missing a lot of players because of poor management and financial issues, and we can’t NOT give young players a shot. We are also extremely trusting of young talent if they manage to show quality. Our then 17 year old keeper was the captain for quite a bit. All the kids mentioned are Bulgarian, by the way.

A lot of teams happen to similarly give chances to their youth. Arda, Cherno More, Etar, Pirin, Botev Vratsa, Hebar are some examples. It’s just that we can’t really give you infinite chances if you’re not motivated enough or you suck. Heck, some of our young Bulgarian players have had horrendous performances, and we’ve still stuck with them because the manager and the fans trust them. We want them to succeed.

If I were on Berabtov’s team, I would urge them to reconsider where the real issue with young Bulgarian football is, namely the academies. Of course, they already know that, but personally, I would like them to focus on that before making any efforts for sweeping changed to our league’s rules. I firmly believe that with a good and functioning academy system as well as good training grounds, the issue causing the discussion around the Luxury Tax will disappear.

TLDR: The aspiring new head of the Bulgarian FA wants to include a tax for teams using more than a predetermined number of Bulgarians. I think this idea is bad because it will make the league even less competitive and raise prices of Bulgarian players.

Link to the Stiliyan Petrov interview (in Bulgarian):

https://www.youtube.com/live/mUkh9EOO3nA?si=1ydq3SzBHmGhF5Cj