Premier League View

Sepp Blatter has given an interview in The Times regarding his pet subject of the moment, quotas. Despite meeting a brick wall in the face of the European Union, Blatter is ploughing ahead with the project. There is little doubt that he sees this as an ideal solution to protect the status of international football, an aspect of the game that is becoming marginalised by the continued commercial success of the UEFA Champions League and the wealth of the upper echelons of club football.

Specifically in the interview, Blatter focuses on English football which is hardly surprising given the newspaper involved. He says,

Club football at the beginning had a local identity, later a regional and now some of the leagues – I am speaking here about the big clubs of the Premier League – there is no more national identity

It seems to be the contradiction that FIFA has not come to terms with fully. The governing body of football globally is does not grasp the international appeal of the Premier League. Blatter is right to a degree though. The international flavour of the players on show each week ensures that the broadcasting rights dwarf revenues that FIFA can generate from its quadrennial World Cup tournament. The fear that the clubs are taking over the game is not misplaced yet FIFA has enabled this through transfer regulations that make purchasing players from different continents only subject to national and pan-continental laws.

Blatter’s desire to see strong international football co-existing with its club partner is a laudable one yet the two have been on a collision course for decades. Satellite broadcasters transmitting matches around the world learned their trade at successive World Cups. The nature of that tournament is its strength; a tournament every four years gives it a prestige that it deserves. The more junior continental competitions are slowly catching up but will never have the global appeal of the elder sibling.

However, the timescales have meant that international friendlies take place with more frequency and are irrelevant to the modern game. Permitting African, Asian and American countries to play matches in Europe ensures that the clubs hold the whip hand. FIFA has to accept some of the blame for pandering to the clubs needs to have their best players available the weekend after a designated international fixture. Players return injured or later in the season become tired due to the number of fixtures in which they participate.

Blatter wants to limit the number of games players are involved in yet shows no inclination to reduce the international calendar. His demands are incompatible with FIFA’s aims. The principle of the quotas, that half of a team must be eligible for the national team of the country in which their club is based is theoretically sound for improving the standard of those countries. Yet it is also fundamentally flawed. The talent in each country is there already but so his theory goes, it is suppressed by foreign players taking their places.

Blatter claimed in the interview,

If you go to the Premier League – which is a wonderful competition – something is wrong if only four or five teams are fighting for the title and all the others are happy not to be relegated because something is wrong in the essence of football

The ‘six plus five’ rule is designed to make domestic football more competitive. The reality is that it will emphasise the gap between the top four and the rest. Consider the scenario that Blatter alludes to. If the top four have to ensure that they have six native players, their squads are likely to include double that number. This means that they will require forty-eight players between them who are eligible for England. The international squad requires twenty-four players, meaning the likely outcome is that the entire squad will come from four clubs because they have the financial muscle to buy the best English players either at a young age or from other clubs.

Even allowing for the odd one or two who may play for Spurs or Aston Villa or their ilk, Blatter’s aims will be diluted. Add into the scenario that the top four will continue to purchase the cream of the international crop, the situation becomes more polarised and the top four more impregnable.

The only way that the naturalisation rule can achieve the outcome of a more competitive league is if football becomes more altruistic, more communist in its wealth distribution. The clubs who compete in the Champions League would have to share their revenues amongst the rest of the game to facilitate more competition. Private ownership of clubs dictates that this will never happen, killing off investment in one fell swoop were it ever to do so. Failing that, the implementation of a draft system akin to that operated by the NFL would have to take place. The weak get the strongest choices upon which to build a base. Except that the smaller clubs would opt out of this to a certain extent by choosing to transfer their draft choices to the highest bigger in order to survive financially.

The more that Blatter tries to regulate football, the more danger he poses to FIFA’s authority. Even in the egalitarian example above, there are further challenges to overcome such as the Bosman ruling or Article 17. Whichever way FIFA’s President turns, he is hamstrung by the law. Yet ever the optimist or blinkered autocrat depending on your view, Blatter believes the legal challenges are there to be negotiated away,

The law is one thing but it can be adapted, amended, if there is general consensus

Problematically for Blatter, general consensus between the clubs and national associations has been in short supply over the last decade. Despite the subsuming of the G14 into UEFA, consensus on this issue is far away and likely to cost FIFA dear.