Blair Backs Eu Football Reforms

Tony Blair will this week throw his weight behind a radical blueprint to safeguard European football's future. The Prime Minister will endorse the findings of the Independent European Sport Review, which calls for fewer foreign players, a fairer distribution of money, tighter controls on agents and even suggests salary caps could be workable in Europe.

The report will provoke criticism and opposition from rich clubs, such as Chelsea, Real Madrid and Milan, whose financial excesses it is intended to tackle.

Produced by a group of European Union sports ministers including Britain's Richard Caborn, the report paves the way for Uefa to reform the game by forcing clubs to develop more talent rather than buying so many players.

As the report wings its way this week to Downing Street and Brussels, Uefa's chief executive has risked antagonising leading English, Italian and Spanish clubs by describing their excessive spending on transfers and player wages as 'stupid', 'selfish', and 'damaging and dangerous' for football.

Speaking to Observer Sport in Paris after the Champions League final, Lars- Christer Olsson launched a stronglyworded attack against the G-14 group of clubs that represents most of those who qualify for the Champions League from Europe's top five leagues - Spain, England, Italy, Germany and France.

'It is not too dramatic to say that football needs to take action to save itself from going down the road of the closed circus that the G-14 would introduce if their view prevailed,' Olsson said. The politicians' review could, he said, 'save football for the fans and the vast majority of clubs'.

Predictability is a big problem, with the same few clubs perpetually filling the top positions in domestic leagues, Olsson added. He singled out Chelsea's recruitment of Michael Ballack on a reported £130,000-a-week as an example of 'financial excesses nobody can explain', given that they lost £140million last year.