Sepp Blatter gets tough on foreign owners of Premier League clubs
Sepp Blatter demanded an end to the profiteering raids on English clubs by foreign billionaires last night and called for a strict regime of controls to rein in the power of the Barclays Premier League.
The president of Fifa, world football’s governing body, gave warning that the game is at a crossroads at which the richest clubs would become ever richer at the expense of those without the backing of billionaires prepared to spend their way to success. And he has charged Michel Platini, the president of Uefa, with enforcing stricter licensing rules on ownership, which could mean delving into the backgrounds of potential owners and ensuring that they have the cash to support a takeover.
With Newcastle United, Everton and Tottenham Hotspur among the Premier League clubs either on the market or open to bids, Blatter’s intervention could have far-reaching effects. He will hope so, for he presented a damning assessment of the English game only minutes after emerging from a top-level meeting with Euro MPs in Brussels about the future of the professional game in Europe.
Blatter found widespread sympathy among the MEPs on the powerful Committee for Culture and Sport for his plan to introduce a quota system of a minimum of six home-grown players to a maximum of five foreigners — the so-called 6+5 system — in every team, in an effort to prevent the richest clubs relying on buying the best talent from around the world.
But Blatter outlined his fears for an English game overloaded with debt, dominated by four clubs and owned by wealthy foreigners who could walk away at any moment. Although he did not name him, Blatter reserved a volley of criticism for Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Prime Minister of Thailand, who was forced to sell Manchester City to a group from Abu Dhabi while facing corruption charges in his home country.
“We have to be alarmed,” Blatter said. “We have one Prime Minister for Thailand going back to his country and he sells his club like you would sell a shirt. Something is very badly wrong here. I don’t know how it can be stopped, but there is always a danger that these people will just one day leave. You get people turning up with banker’s guarantees who are not interested in football and then they lose interest in the clubs and leave. What happens to the clubs then?
“We are facing now investment in football, particularly the Premier League, that is out of control and this is where Uefa will have to do something with the licensing system. English football is attractive to investors; it is a phenomenon of the era. The economic power of football is immense.”
Blatter also revealed that he had met George Gillett Jr and Tom Hicks, the controversial American owners of Liverpool, at the 2007 Champions League final. They were upset that Liverpool lost to AC Milan, he said, but the Fifa president seemed less than impressed with the demeanour of two men who have caused turmoil at one of the world’s greatest clubs.
With the credit crunch biting harder each day, Blatter knows that he is speaking to an audience of fans receptive to his warnings, but the Fifa president also knows that he is powerless, for now, to intervene in a free market without the backing of the European Union and football associations throughout the Continent. And the one place that he is likely to meet implacable resistance is the Premier League, which is riding high on a wave of £2.7 billion paid by television broadcasters that could help the league’s 20 clubs to outlast the financial storm.
Top clubs could probably survive a downturn in ticket sales and corporate entertaining on the back of the huge payouts from television. The “big four” — Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal — have even fewer worries, with tens of millions of pounds sluicing into their coffers from the Champions League, which is rapidly becoming an exclusive sporting club for the super-rich of European football.
The Champions League is so lucrative that Blatter fears that it will become a closed shop, with the richest deciding that entry should be reserved for them alone. “I remember the G14, G18, or whatever it was, group of clubs talking about breaking away,” Blatter said. “That doesn’t exist any more, but they have the Champions League and they might want to make that league closed to anyone else. That would be hugely detrimental to football.”
Which is why Blatter believes that football faces a pivotal moment, one at which the sport can decide to press on as it is with the wealthiest clubs, owned by egotistical foreign billionaires, cherry-picking players from around the world while the rest rack up debt and scrape along, knowing that trophies are a distant dream. Or the administrators and clubs can thrash out a new future — starting with the 6+5 rule. That would help to produce a level playing field, with clubs forced to develop their own talent yet still able to showcase some of the world’s best players. It is a long shot, but Blatter has the agreement of Brussels; now he has to find a way around European laws that guarantee free movement within Europe’s boundaries and the right of workers to choose where they ply their trade.
It can be done, Blatter said last night, but he knows that it will be a struggle to meet his deadline of 2011 to introduce the quota system. Whether he achieves it will be a measure of football’s willingness to change and Blatter’s belief that money is not everything. Instead, he believes that a playing field dominated by a handful of clubs is against the spirit and long-term health of a sport that was once the heartbeat of local communities, nurtured on the terraces and watched over by men who came from the towns where their clubs were located, not in foreign boardrooms at the mercy of international currency markets and credit crunches.
Growing foreign legions
The Barclays Premier League clubs who are under foreign ownership
Aston Villa — American
Chelsea — Russian
Fulham — Egyptian
Liverpool — American
Manchester City — Abu Dhabi
Manchester United — American
Portsmouth — French/Russian
Sunderland — Irish
West Ham United — Icelandic
