Homegrown hysteria

There's been a lot of talk about the big corrupt fat one at FIFA's attempts to introduce a rule that would limit the number of non-domestic players playing for teams, the so called 6 plus 5 rule. Unfortunately for the corrupt fatty the EU have given his proposals the red card, as they contravene EU law:

"1.Freedom of movement for workers shall be secured within the Community.

2.Such freedom of movement shall entail the abolition of any discrimination based on nationality between workers of the Member States as regards employment, remuneration and other conditions of work and employment."

It always seems to be the fault of foreign players whenever our great country fails to qualify for a major tournament. This argument seems a tad simplistic given the quality of player in the England squad, demonstrated by how many Englishman played in the Champions League final. Practically reducing the number of foreigners in our game would just reduce the quality of our league, and damage the Premiership, probably just increasing the number of mediocre Englishman playing and doing nothing good for out national side. While some small countries' leagues would be completely decimated if they were strictly limited in the number of foreign players. There are clearly some very deep rooted problems in the way that the English game fails to encourage and protect technical excellence from a young age, until these problems are addressed, no number of new rules will make a damn bit of difference to the quality available for the national side.

UEFA have been pushing for the introduction of their own limits on players by the introduction of a 'homegrown' players rule which introduces quotas of a certain minimum number of so called homegrown players who 'must have been with the club for at least 3 years and bought in between 15 - 21 years of age'. The EU seem to be happy with UEFA's ideas and they are already upon us. There is certainly no need to panic as the new UEFA rules only mean that Arsenal will have to have eight 'homegrown' players in our 25 man Champions League squad for next season, given that the likes of Cesc, Clichy, Diaby, Traore, Senderos, Walcott, Hoyte, Djorou, Van Persie and Bendtner already qualify or will soon qualify as 'homegrown' players, we will not have much to worry about.

So don't panic, the fat greedy corrupt Blatter and his bribed buddies are very unlikely to get their way with their badly thought out new rules that directly contravene EU law. I have to say that if they did get their way it could be catastrophic for football as whole, not only in the big leagues of Europe but also in the smaller leagues where there simply wouldn't be enough domestic players to make up a decent league. Also just imagine how over inflated the transfer market would become for domestic talent, it's bad enough already. FIFA insist their new rule doesn't break EU law but to me it's pretty clear that it does as, simply look at the clause 2 above, it's hard to see how forcing clubs to start with 6 domestic players wouldn't be blatantly discriminatory as far as players' conditions of employment is concerned.