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Foot : Blatter Against Inflated Salaries (13.10.2005)
FIFA will create a task force to deal with financial excesses in football.
The President of the world football governing body, FIFA, is concerned about high players` wages, rising ticket prices, the role of agents in transfers, falling attendances and saturated television coverage of games. In a highly critical comment entitled "greed is threatening the beautiful game", published in Financial Times yesterday, Sepp Blatter, said football is now a multibillion-dollar global industry. "Unfortunately, the haphazard way in which money has flowed into the game — reminiscent of a misguided, wild-west style of capitalism — is having some seriously harmful effects. The time has come to take action to curb the excesses and ensure that the sport protects its roots," he wrote.
If nothing is done, Blatter said, money could suffocate a sport that has no fewer than 1.3 billion active followers. He noted that while many teams were poor, a few fortunate clubs were richer than ever thanks to benevolent owners. "What makes this a matter for concern is that, all too often, the source of this wealth is individuals with little or no history of interest in the game, who use football as a means of serving some hidden agenda," Blatter wrote. "Having set foot in the sport seemingly out of nowhere they proceed to throw pornographic amounts of money at it. What they do not understand is that football is more about grass roots than idols. More than ever before, the majority is fighting with spears, while the greedy few have the financial equivalent of nuclear warheads," he explained.
Joseph Sepp Blatter also attacked wealthy players and club owners, saying such huge
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amounts of money available at the top tiers of football risked wrecking the sport. He castigated the huge wages paid to players, bitterly attacking "the spectacle of semi-educated, sometimes foul-mouthed players" already earning huge sums but "holding clubs to ransom" for more. It was "simply insane" for a player to earn 6-8 million pounds (about 6-8 billion) a year, as the very top earners now do. "What logic, right or economic necessity, would qualify a man in his mid-20s to demand to earn in a month a sum that his own father, and the majority of fans, could not hope to earn in a decade?" Blatter asked.
The FIFA president condemned European clubs and speculators who buy the commercial rights of young players to generate profit each time those players are subsequently sold. He said the practice was a "new type of slavery" that must be curbed. "I find it unhealthy, if not despicable, for rich clubs to send scouts shopping in Africa, South America and Asia to `buy` the most promising players there," Blatter wrote. He said unless action is taken against the problems identified by FIFA the outcome of matches will become increasingly predictable. " What we are faced with today is a football society of haves and have nots," he wrote. "This cannot be the future of our game. FIFA cannot sit by and see greed rule the football world. Nor shall we."
It is to this effect that Sepp Blatter announced the creation of a new FIFA task force to examine the "pornographic amounts of money" that have created big divisions in the sport and "deal with the kinds of excesses I have outlined". He added that: "And I am confident that this initiative will bear fruit quickly and decisively.
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