Last week, a 21-year-old soccer player named Harry Kane made a spectacular debut for England’s national team, scoring against Lithuania just 79 seconds after entering the game and then wheeling away with a look of joyous disbelief as a crowd of roughly 80,000 countrymen roared approval.
Mr. Kane’s unexpected emergence this season as the leading scorer for his club team, Tottenham Hotspur, has captivated fans — not least because he was born and raised a few miles from Tottenham’s north London stadium.
It has also made him a beacon of an anti-globalization groundswell that aims to restrict the participation of foreign players in England’s soccer leagues.
“How many other Harry Kanes are there in the academies of English football who cannot get a first-team game?” Greg Dyke, chairman of English soccer’s governing body, the Football Association, wrote in an opinion article published by The Guardian. “We are simply not giving young domestic talent sufficient opportunities at the highest level of English football.”
