UNTOLD ARSENAL » Blog Archive » Transfer of Cesc, Denilson, Vela etc to be illegal under new regs

In one sense it looks like a race, with the FA, the EPL and UEFA all trying to get in first with ideas to reform European football.

Today it is the turn of Michel Platini who like the others chooses to ignore the corruption that is evident in Italy, and which has almost certainly seeped into the Champions League and other European leagues.

His new idea is to put in place measures that would have made Arsenal’s development of a series of brilliant young players quite impossible.

Under cover of establishing financial fair play, as he calls it, and with lots of references to Manchester Arab, he actually tore into Arsenal saying,

“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.”

Most of the media will not pick up on this point and will stay with his comment that,  “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.”

But it is the attack on the idea of allowing younger players to come to a club like Arsenal and learn their skills early enough to stand a chance at competing at the highest level, which is the really retrogressive part of the UEFA campaign.   Such a move will hardly hit the free spending clubs like KGB Fulham, Manchester Arab, Manchester Bankrupt and Liverpool Insolvency.   It will hit at the financially stable Arsenal, however.

(c) Tony Attwood 2009