FIFA president Sepp Blatter has again hit the headlines with controversial plans to reduce the number of top flight team in Europe’s major leagues and to force clubs to use more homegrown players.

In an interview with German magazine Bild, Blatter outlined his vision of bringing the size of Europe’s top leagues down to 16 teams as he feels “the market and the players cannot cope with so much football.” The issue will be put forward to be discussed at the 2007 FIFA Congress and would be sure to cause an outrage amongst some of the lower ranking clubs with the Bundesliga currently having 18 teams, while the top leagues in Spain, England, Italy and France have 20.

Mr. Blatter, however, believes the majority of clubs are tired of playing so many games and sees a reduction in the league size as the main way to combat it. He also indicated that even if the clubs and federations were unwilling to change that a decree from FIFA could still be enforced.

“FIFA can stipulate it and it is the wish of many clubs, but the FIFA need to order it otherwise it will never happen.”

Previous calls by Blatter to reduce the size of domestic European leagues were rejected in 2003.

In the same interview Blatter also put forward a proposal to reverse the movement towards foreign players overtaking homegrown players in European leagues. With the problem rife amongst German and English clubs, Mr. Blatter offered the idea that a minimum of six homegrown players in the starting eleven should be enforced in an effort to protect the major countries’ national football future. With cut price foreign players often preferred to more expensive domestic players there have been occassions when clubs such as Arsenal have turned out teams completely full of foreigners, a situation Sepp Blatter rightly views as “dangerous”.

How the European Union would view the restrictions would be another matter entirely and would pose an interesting battle of legal minds if the EU and FIFA did ever square off in the courtroom to decide the issue.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 10:01 pm and is filed under General Football Articles. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.