Platini calls on European parliament to make sport a special case

Michel Platini has today delivered an impassioned, 90-minute speech to the European parliament calling for sport to be granted exemptions from competition law. The Uefa president's address was an effort to head off challenges to its attempts at capping the salaries and expenditure of clubs.

• Making specific reference to the financial excesses of Manchester City, who made “astronomical bids” for Kaka, Thierry Henry, John Terry and others during the January transfer window. Platini sought to prepare the ground for Uefa rules “establishing financial fair play”.
• “During this year’s festive season, one club which had suddenly become very rich made various astronomical bids in the transfer market,” said Platini. “Of course, there was a tremendous outcry in the football family, people called it outrageous and scandalous.
• “Is it morally acceptable to offer such sums of money for a single player? We are currently looking at the idea of limiting, to a certain degree, a club’s expenditure on staff – salary and transfer fees combined – to an as yet undecided percentage of its direct and indirect sporting revenue.”
• That kind of financial engineering is sure to be resisted by right-wing MEPs who are wedded to free-market principles. But, after previous attempts at securing exemptions from European law for sport, Platini senses that in the current climate there is more appetite for reform.
• He believes that the unique “solidarity” between the elite clubs at the top down to the grassroots game at the bottom of the football pyramid – with all the social functions that performs – justifies sport being treated differently from other businesses.
• “Professional football is no more a financial service than it is an agricultural activity,” he said. “It is just as absurd to want to regulate football through the automatic application of competition law as it would be to do so through the Common Agricultural Policy.
• “We must not delude ourselves, for even huge clubs like Manchester United or Real Madrid are financial dwarves compared with Microsoft or Exxon. The turnover of most European first division clubs is smaller than that of their city’s largest supermarket.
• “We now know that none of this is true: that in football as in the economy in general, the market is incapable of correcting its own excesses, and it was not the Uefa president who said so, it was Barack Obama.”
• Equally weighty in Platini’s speech were references to Uefa’s desire to outlaw transfers of players under the age of 18. Drawing on a clause in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child he attested that European laws on the free movement of workers — through which such transfers are made possible — have become an anachronism.
• “The European commission talks of free movement of workers from the age of 16,” said Platini. “This might have seemed reasonable in the 1950s, but is that still the case today for most skilled jobs, at a time when many European countries have raised the school-leaving age to 18?
• “I have therefore thought about this problem a great deal and I am now convinced that the international transfer – yes international – of players under 18 should be prohibited, fully in accordance with the Fifa statutes. Some people talk about the free movement of workers. I am talking about the protection of children.”