Soccer chief’s own goal

HE GETS a lot of stick, does poor old Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore.

I am sure that on occasion he does get it absolutely right. But Scudamore's recent pronouncements against Sepp Blatter's idea for a '6+5' rule to limit the number of foreign players in the English top flight aren't the best advert for his good sense.

The FIFA president, a Swede, reckons that a maximum of five overseas players should be present in starting line-ups in domestic competition. An independent commission subsequently claimed this does not breach EU law.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that Scudamore disagrees. After all, he is the mouthpiece for a money-mad competition with precious little regulation, which allows leveraged buy-outs, saddling some of our biggest and proudest clubs with massive levels of debt and foreign ownership.

"I do struggle where nationalism, jingoism and patriotism stops and where actually some sort of xenophobic rhetoric takes over," Scudamore said.

"And there is a certain amount of that in the football world when I keep getting told 'how can English football be English football when there are not enough English players in a particular team?'

“I struggle with that when everyone bar David Beckham, who is qualified to play for England at the top level, is playing at home."

Thus, anyone who wants legislation ensuring home-grown representation in our national sport should presumably frog march off to join the British National Party.

Scudamore ignores the fact that at the highest level the national pool of English talent is currently shallower than a dolled-up Paris Hilton stepping in a puddle.

There are fewer nationally-qualified players regularly turning out in Premier League matches than in any other such competition in Europe.

While Scudamore was justifying maintaining the status quo, England manager Fabio Capello was reduced to calling up striker Daren Bent to the senior squad for tomorrow's game against the Ukraine — as a replacement for the injured Emile Heskey.

Breathe that sentence in and think about it for a minute. Then tell me that things are just fine as they are.

It goes without saying that foreign footballers have provided a great boost to our national game. But it has got to the stage where there have to be limits.

Keeping things the way they are will only benefit the 'big four', who have everything — such as unnecessarily massive squads of players on enormous wages, funded by virtually-guaranteed Champions' League qualification year after year — just the way they want it at the moment.

Sadly, the Premier League seem all-too happy to comply. At the start of this season, a little rule change was slipped in making things yet more cushy for the those clubs with oversized squads.

Instead of selecting from five substitutes, teams could now choose from seven — though only three changes can still be made in any one game.

If anyone can give me one benefit to the sport that this small but significant development brought about, other than making it much easier for the bigger clubs with masses of international players to cover every in-game eventuality, please let me know.

mattchambers@oldham-chronicle.co.uk