On the other hand, while a complete ban on the transfer of young players would be unproductive, I think some regulation of the same would actually be a very positive move. The fact that right now young players can move to, say, an English club from a Spanish club without any compensation being paid to the club that developed them is a problem, IMHO, one which has seen clubs resort to the regular court system to get compensation.

Woo hoo.

My view is certainly informed by my strong belief that 6+5 simply won’t work under European law and that the political power of the “importing” countries within the EU is too great to allow for the passage of the “sporting exemption” that would be necessary to allow it.

The French have been lobbying for such an exemption for yonks without success and there is no reason to believe they are any more likely to get it now than they were before (in fact, I think that there is a strong argument that is significantly less likely to pass in the EU25 than it was in the EU12).

I agree that a DNCG-like authority wouldn’t necessarily have to be regressive, and I certainly agree that there are problems regarding club financial administration that could stand to be centrally addressed. But I think that the spirit behind this specific central authority is regressive, in part because of the language in which it’s been justified, and in part because it’s packaged at the moment with proposals like the 6+5 rule and the ban on youth transfers that do seem inherently reactionary.

If we could split apart the portmanteau proposal as you suggest, I’d be more open to this specific part of it. But my sense is that Euro-bureau convenience aside, the intent behind all these proposals is relatively unified and that they go together stylistically as well as from committee convenience.

(Bold and italics, by the way, can be had by using html tags—”strong” and “/strong” for bold, “em” and “/em” for italics. Put those in triagular brackets on either side of the word you want to alter.)

In haste—happy holiday, everyone!

Frog-baiting is what they do (as do the Sun, Mail, Express, etc.)

But the Guardian headline would have been something like “Artisanal Plan Foiled by Middle England Opponents”. And of course “Plan” would be italics so as to signal everyone to pronounce it “plon”.*

There’s a lot in your post, and some of it is quite hard to unpack, but I’d like to try to start a dialog by de-linking the elements of the portmanteau proposal (which bears all of the hallmarks of a typical Bruxellois committee process) and by questioning the assumption that introducing a DNCG-like authority is necessarily retrograde.

It certainly could be, but I’m far from convinced that it has to be. For those of us who live in countries where top flight clubs go bust with a certain regularity, where players can go six or seven months without being (see, e.g. Pescara) and where financial shenanigans are a national sport, the idea that someone might actually have the abilty and inclination to mind the store has quite an obvious appeal.

Such a system might well have prevented me from having to support a club called “Florentia Viola” for a season, and that would have been a very good thing.

* speaking of italics, could you share the code for enabling italics and bold text in comments? Or is it under lock and key in a vault somewhere?