Brussels, 18/02/2009 (Agence Europe) - Football is a great teacher of friendship and diversity. “If we want to remain so, everything will have to change, and radically change certain parts and some rules,” UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) President Michel Platini told the European Parliament on Wednesday 18 February in his vigorous argument for making sport an exception and in heavily criticising the horse trading and economic approach to football. Football, he said, was not confined just to the elite, which represents only 1% of those who play the game, but covers a multitude of people who, through grass roots football, maintain the key values of solidarity and friendship. Welcoming Parliament's involvement in the defence of the European sports model and football's values, and the initiatives of the European Commission to try to acknowledge the peculiarity of sport in its White Paper, the Former footballer, nonetheless, sounded the alarm. “There is still a slightly perverse tendency within the European institutions to deny the unity of the football pyramid and to isolate the professional game at the top. This is done in order to give substance to the false notion that professional football is an economic activity just like any other,” he said. He is firmly opposed to the application of competition law to the sports model: he says this denies the specific nature of sport. “We refuse categorically to be held in a straitjacket or ties to prefabricated models that are based on the false equation that professional sport equals a purely economic activity,” he said. The biggest football clubs are dwarfed financially by giants such as Microsoft and Exxon, and subjecting them to the same economic logic has dramatic consequences for, very often amateur, producer clubs, which are backbone of social football, he went on. He also addressed the issue of the transfer of players for fantastic sums of money, and the usefulness of setting a cap on players' wages. UEFA is currently examining the idea of, in some way, linking expenditure on staff at a club, both wages and transfers, to a determined percentage of its direct and indirect sporting income, in order to restore some balance in sports competitions, he said.
On the controversial question of the sale of young football players, Platini slammed the European Commission's plan to reduce the minimum age of the free circulation of players to 16 because this would encourage the trafficking of children because teenagers would be attracted to Europe by unscrupulous agents who would dangle the idea of an international football career in front of them only to abandon most of them in Europe without the proper paperwork and without the option of getting basic education. “I call that child trafficking (…) I am convinced that the international transfer - yes international - of players under 18 should be prohibited, fully in accordance with the FIFA statutes,” said the UEFA chairman. On the role of players' agents, he called for greater regulation of the profession, which is vital for supporting young players but requires specific skills and is frequently abused. Agents have to exist but rules are needed, said Michel Platini. The question is currently under discussion at FIFA, he explained, adding that many abuses would disappear of themselves if the free circulation of players is set at 18: “I will do all I can to make this happen. I will do all I can for the sport that I love and the values that it represents. I will do all I can, but I urge you to do the rest.” (I.L. trans fl)