FIFA president Gianni Infantino: Soccer needs to consider reforms like salary caps and caps on transfer and agent fees
- by Paul Kennedy @pkedit, May 5, 2021
FIFA president Gianni Infantino said soccer's world governing body is considering a wide range of reforms that it will propose so international club soccer is able to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic better than it entered the current crisis.
"I already said it," Infantino said in an interview with the Paris sports daily L'Equipe in its Wednesday edition. "But perhaps my words will now be better received: soccer's actors -- working with political bodies -- must ask the right questions and propose solutions."
He said it's essential to help both clubs and their players with the goals of promoting financial stability, competitive balance and making competitions more exciting.
Among the reforms he said need to be seriously considered:
-- Salary caps, plus caps on transfer fees and caps on agent fees;
-- Limits on the maximum number of players on rosters with requirements for a minimum of homegrown players;
-- Limits on the number of games a player can play in a season along with minimum rest days between games;
-- Reductions in the maximum number of teams in leagues and the introduction of playoffs.
Among the other projects Infantino mentioned were his pet project -- a new Club World Cup to replace the current competition and Confederations Cup -- and a Club World Cup for women, which he said will happen "very soon" and will "truly revolution women soccer."
Words are meaningless without transparency and due diligence.
It is a fantastic idea, but it's going to be very difficult to apply in today's football (soccer) environment.
I notice that whenever these guys call for changes, they never say they should share the revenues more equally- even though that would have as much positive effect on competitive parity as anything else.
Instead, they always want to do thing that would simply wind up meaning the rich clubs with lots of revenue would still be rich with lots of revenue, and they just couldn't spend as much of it- meaning the rich owners would stay rich and get richer.
Meanwhile, competitive parity might be helped a BIT, but in the end, let's face it, the rich people will always be ahead of the less-rich people.
If they really want to try and make football better, they'd call for the entire pyramid to be in a giant revenue sharing pool, and across leagues they'd set maximum income inequality limits with much more aggressive revenue sharing.
That would mean that, given more equal resources to all clubs, the ones that would eventually rise to the top would be those who spent the most WISELY, instead of simply those that spent the MOST.
Paul, unfortunately the greed factor is a roadblock that Don Infantino refuses to address.