Brian Barwick dances to the tune of Sepp Blatter

Sepp Blatter, the president of Fifa, behaves like a man who thinks he runs the world, and with acolytes such as Brian Barwick, the chief executive of the FA, at his feet, is it any wonder?

Barwick was representing English football at Fifa’s congress in Sydney last week, when Blatter’s proposal that only five foreign players should be allowed in each team was put to the vote. Six plus five, as the concept is known, would be ruinous for English football. There is no guarantee that it would increase the standard of the national team and it would weaken the power of English clubs in Europe.

Yet, as predicted, as far as the lick-spittle FA is concerned, anything Blatter says goes until the hustling for the right to host the 2018 World Cup finals is over. Blatter could lead a call to invade Poland and we would be first across the border. Faced with having to stand against the Fifa president, Barwick’s nerve went. He joined the ranks in favour of exploring the proposal, helping to deliver the landslide victory that Blatter’s ego hardly needs.

Later, as Barwick sought to justify this squalid little sell-out, he should have been thrown top hat, tails and a cane so he could have tap-danced properly. He voted in favour only to explore the legality of the plan under European Union law. Bringing through more high-quality players was a priority for the FA. Beyond that, it was committed to meritocracy.

What rot. Since the 2018 World Cup bid was announced, all that has been heard from Soho Square is the squeal of realpolitik. Everything is geared to one month in the summer a decade from now and if that means selling the domestic game down the river, so be it. There is no need to debate the legality of Blatter’s plan under EU labour laws; it is illegal, simple as that. As for high-quality players, there is no guarantee that this scheme would do anything to raise standards. The best English players would become vastly overpriced and corralled within the elite, the smaller clubs would be left with the herd and standards would fall.

In the days when Uefa insisted on quotas of home-nationality players in European competition, Manchester United were forced to field teams that were no longer subject to meritocracy when playing in the Champions League. On November 2, 1994, United took on Barcelona at the Nou Camp and to make his numbers work Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager, selected Wigan-born Gary Walsh in goal, ahead of Peter Schmeichel. Did this instantly make Walsh a higher-quality player, fitting in with present FA logic? No, it made him an unqualified impostor and Barcelona won 4-0. Walsh’s ability was not improved by getting a chance he did not deserve and he played out a mediocre career, frequently as an understudy, at Bradford City, Middlesbrough and Wigan Athletic.

The numbers of foreign players in the English game is a problem, but not an insurmountable one. As salaries and transfer fees rise, clubs are increasingly focused on young talent, even if some are looking to cast the net to Ouagadougou as much as Watford. This is boom time for the international contingent in the Barclays Premier League, from 11 nonBritish or Irish players in the year it was formed to more than 250 in 2007, but there will be a better balance, given time.

The Scottish league went the same way, reached tipping point with inflated wages paid to average imports and adjusted. English football can travel the same path, without the dead hand of Blatter to steer the way.

Barwick will no doubt claim privately that he had no choice but to back the president because to do otherwise would have scuppered the World Cup bid, but if those are the choices, better not to continue than an existence spent grovelling to Fifa. The present dalliance with Jack Warner, the Fifa vice-president, in Trinidad is odious enough. Barwick may also claim that a vote against would have mattered little, with Blatter’s proposal going through on a majority of 155-5, but that is not the full story. There were 40 abstentions, so 45 nations failed to back the president, a not insignificant number, and a braver man than Barwick would have been among them.

Like many of Michel Platini’s actions at Uefa, the heightened resolve of Fifa to introduce a quota system smacks of score-settling. Fifa felt slighted that the Premier League’s idea for a 39th game to be played abroad had been revealed without proper consultation. Warner said as much at the weekend. He did not think it a bad plan but whined that Richard Scudamore, the Premier League chief executive, should have talked it through with Fifa and Uefa first. In other words, cut the boys in on it, sort them out, grease and toady and tug your forelock to these jumped up little twerps that presume they operate for the good of the game.

We know what type of allies Fifa likes: the Club World Championship has just been transferred to that hotbed of football excellence, the United Arab Emirates, in 2009 and 2010. After that it will revert to Japan until 2012. And to think that some cynics claim that it is all only about money these days.

Thanks to Barwick, Fifa knows that it has English football dancing on a string. It took the Premier League 16 years to be established as the strongest in the world and the FA could yet cede that for the bounty of a month-long jamboree. This is not realpolitik. This is just real dumb.

Spurred elsewhere

“Like everything else in this miserable game, it comes down to pounds, shillings and pence,” Simon Jordan, the Crystal Palace chairman, said of John Bostock’s move to Tottenham Hotspur. “Surely it should be what is best for a 16-year-old and where he is most likely to play.”

It is always a surprise when successful businessmen, whose wealth is driven by market forces and the bottom line, wish others, such as Bostock’s father, to operate by a different set of rules. Jordan’s argument also presumes that the best place for a teenage prodigy to develop is at Selhurst Park because he will get more first-team games, and that is wrong.

Bostock is 16. He is a learner, a novice, albeit a phenomenally talented one, and at this stage the only concern should be where his abilities will be better schooled. The options are with Neil Warnock, a good club manager but offering a single season of top-flight experience ending in relegation, or Juande Ramos, twice a winner of the Uefa Cup at Seville, a trophy winner in his first season in England and widely regarded as one of the foremost developers of young players in Europe. It is not only money that makes it sensible to sign for Tottenham, then.

Beckham mystery tour

David Beckham, the most famous footballer on the planet, captained England in last night’s match away to Trinidad & Tobago, played purely to sweeten Jack Warner, a Fifa powerbroker, and encourage favour for the 2018 World Cup finals bid. Yet Beckham made his position clear when he resigned the captaincy in 2006, so his selection is a mystery. Fabio Capello says that he does not do PR stunts; but, like Carlsberg, if he did, they would probably be the best PR stunts in the world.

Private protesters

Sir Alex Ferguson claims that the attitude of the Glazer family to Cristiano Ronaldo’s proposed move to Real Madrid is that they would rather sit him in the stands every week than sell. It would be some statement and could only be made by a club in private control. No plc would be so bold.

Reluctant billionaires

The Formula One consortium that owns Queens Park Rangers contains some of sport’s richest men, we are regularly told. Among them, it is now rumoured, is Vijay Mallya, described, like the rest, as a free-spending billionaire. The trouble is, from the somewhat earthbound appointment of Iain Dowie onwards, there remains little sign of any of them wanting to spend very freely at Loftus Road. Roman Abramovich: now that is what you call a free-spending billionaire.

Community spirited

Sunil Galati, the president of the United States Soccer Federation, says that he would welcome the Community Shield match, the traditional curtain-raiser to the English season, being played in his country. Not a bad idea. After all, who over here cares about it?

Clarke conundrum

Henk ten Cate has gone and Steve Clarke, the other assistant coach to Avram Grant at Chelsea, is said to be next. Big difference. Ten Cate was always about the show, a big, tough guy to take on the players in the way Grant would not. At any properly functioning club he would have been surplus to requirements. But Clarke?

He is the sort of figure who is indispensable for a new manager, particularly one coming from abroad; a man who knows the club, their traditions, their uniqueness. Arsène Wenger spotted a man such as that in Pat Rice at Arsenal; for the same reason, Gustavo Poyet has been vital to Juande Ramos at Tottenham Hotspur.

Clarke was not brought in by José Mourinho. Already a youth-team coach, he was quickly promoted as someone capable of giving the new manager insight into what made Chelsea tick. It is a commonsense strategy for any manager entering an alien world; common sense, however, is in short supply at Stamford Bridge these days.

Saints preserve us

By any reckoning, the management career of Jan Poortvliet, the new Southampton manager, has been unexceptional. Its highlight was winning promotion from the Eerste Divisie, Holland’s equivalent of the Coca-Cola Championship, with Den Bosch in 2001. His previous employers, Helmond Sport, finished seventh in the Eerste Divisie this season. The stadium capacity is 4,100.

He must have something going for him, though, because Southampton’s new executive team of Michael Wilde and Rupert Lowe have made him their first appointment. “We need to adopt a European-style coaching system with the object of linking the academy to the first team,” Wilde said. Translation? We’ll be selling our best players, trying to stay in the division with kids and there is not an English manager of any substance who would go for it.

(taken from: here)