Lawyers are busy and wealthy for many reasons. There are even one or two good ones.
Key among these reasons is the need to have somebody to clear up the inevitable ambiguity of everyday language.
It’s all too easy to reach for and use a phrase which one imagines will be broadly understood but which, in the hands of our learned friends, appears to contain more holes than the average sieve.
The use of the word ‘home’ as a prefix for just about anything appears to be particularly open to i) misinterpretation or ii) wilful misuse.
For example, certain restaurants are still prone to presenting food as ‘home cooked’ when, in fact, they mean that dishes prepared in the kitchens of massive catering supply companies have simply been placed in the microwave by the establishment’s ‘chefs’.
Is a motor car built in the north east of England from parts that have, by and large, been produced in the Far East, a ‘home grown’ British product or simply the child of a marriage of financial convenience?
Things are not always what they seem. In Europe there’s a range of ‘authentic Italian’ pasta and pasta sauce products whose packaging makes lavish use of the Italian flag and Neopolitan imagery but which, on perusal of the small print, is discovered to be a product not of the Costa d’Amalfi, a stone’s throw from the sparkling blue Mediterranian, but some industrial estate in Holland, a stone’s throw from Schiphol airport.
The presentation of just about anything as ‘home-made’ or ‘home-grown’ tends to bestow a sort of wholesomeness. It’s the farm store rather than the supermarket, locally crafted rather warehouse retailer.
Now the definition of ‘home-grown’ is being discussed in soccer circles like never before.
UEFA this week introduced regulations that mean that, by 2008, teams playing in the Champions League or UEFA Cup will have to include eight ‘home-grown’ players in their 25 man squads - a third of the playing strength.
Now that may be a big ask for certain clubs from certain countries, including Holland, Scotland and, of course, England. It’s not so long since the then Chelsea manager Ruud Gullit fielded the first team in an FA Premier League fixture totally devoid of British players. They won…the fans cheered and life moved on. But notes had been taken.
Supporters of international football will undoubtedly welcome this latest UEFA move. It’s been said before but worth reiterating that it’s becoming difficult for some national team managers to find suitable players in certain positions, because at the elite level all the jobs have gone to players who represent other nations. Try finding an English goalkeeper in the Premier League or more than a handful of Scottish players who experience Champions League football. Even Germany has a striker crisis.
So the UEFA regulations are a good thing, yes?
Well, maybe not. And here we return to the matter of definition.
UEFA says that a ‘home-grown’ player is a 15-21-year-old who has been brought up through a club’s academy system or the academy of another club in that country. It does not say that the youngsters in question have to be a national of that country.
So, here’s the alternative scenario.
Spurred on by the new rules, increasingly ambitious clubs scour the world for talent at an even lower age. Instead of trialling kids from local clubs they launch talent sweeps of, for example, West Africa, Asia and the USA, where a new generation of talent is ripening and where the domestic soccer systems are not so well developed or affluent as those to be found in Europe.
As a result, kids are taken - albeit willingly I guess - from their own environment and plopped down in some European industrial city at an ever earlier age. As a result they qualify as ‘home-grown’ but may well take up places that would otherwise have gone to a true local.
The result is a distortion of player development which, ultimately, fails to achieve its objectives of helping young, genuinely home-grown players, and further drains away the talent available to national team managers by robbing them of developmental resources.
UEFA’s decision comes in the week that Deloitte published a report showing that Premier League club spending during the January close season remained buoyant at around the same level as last year. The clubs spent £50million.
Since July 2003, transfer sending has been bloated by Chelsea’s £260million-worth of dealings. This accounts for 60 per cent of all transfer activity and is more than double that of rivals Arsenal and Manchester United combined.
But significantly, given the UEFA ruling, around two-thirds of the spend has gone to non-English clubs, the highest proportion since the formation of the Premier League.
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Elsewhere in football, UEFA has appointed German agency Sportfive to handle the sale of rights for the Euro 2008 championships.
They will sell territory by territory instead of doing a block deal with the European Broadcast Union (EBU). This is expected to raise additional cash although the EBU is naturally opposed to the move. But the appointment is interesting in so much as it highlights a difference in television rights sales strategy between UEFA and FIFA, which is apparently opposed to using a single agency to sell its rights after the 2006 World Cup.
Whether this is the right strategy remains to be seen and Infront, which is selling rights for 2006, certainly believes strongly that working with a single partner not only secures cash upfront for the federation, but makes managing the entire process cleaner and simpler.
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The International Rugby Board this week confirmed that Japan, New Zealand and South Africa are bidding to stage the World Cup in 2011.
While this may not yet be contentious, rugby is an intensely political environment and bidding to stage the World Cup has become something of an entertainment in its own right.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the rift between Australia and New Zealand over the collapse of co-hosting plans for the 2003 RWC is still evident, while the tactics employed by France to win the hosting rights for 2007 were privately described by one senior international rugby official in terms which simply couldn’t be repeated here for risk of incurring the wrath of the internet censorship police.
So good luck guys…you’ll most likely need it.
