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Why FIFA’s 6 + 5 Rule Represents The Wrong Fight Against the Globalization of the World’s Most Global Sport

FIFA’s proposed 6 + 5 rule is supposedly gaining traction. The law would require club teams to start a minimum of six players eligible for the national team of the country in which they play. This would affect the way the world sees, plays, and relates to the game – in a scary, and undetermined, way.

The guiding principles of the 6 + 5 rule puncture some of the softer spots in my already gooey emotional attachment to soccer. In theory, the 6+ 5 rule serves to improve the financial and competitive equality of club teams while protecting the national identity of those teams, and by association the identity of the national teams they feed. This sounds good. But the proposal doesn’t suggest a sensitive or realistic understanding of its own implications. Beneath FIFA’s ideal portrait of improved “equality” and “competition” lie vast questions about the proposal’s economic, moral, and cultural shortcomings. As FIFA and the European Union work out the crucial details and lawfulness of this proposal, maybe the argument will become more clear and convincing. Right now, it isn’t either, in principle or possible affect.

The 6 + 5 rule would shackle the international marketplace of soccer by design. I doubt that placing such limitations on the marketplace will produce any more financial equality than the current capitalistic system of club management. How will requiring club teams to field a certain number of homegrown players force the managers of these clubs to make more frugal investments in players? Won’t the biggest and richest clubs still buy whichever players they want? Without implementing spending caps or more economic-driven incentives, FIFA seems powerless to change the deep-rooted financial inequalities of clubs. As opposed to making more frugal expenditures, big clubs will pay inflated prices for homegrown talent. Market inefficiencies will balloon. More than fans or bottom table club teams, the big winners will be vastly overpaid English players – the Michael Owens and Darren Bents – who will benefit from their noble birthplace and bidding wars that make me sick even imagining.

Blatter seems to have his heart in the right place. He wants clubs to focus their resources inwards, on what should be the roots of their success, on developing players and national identity instead of on buying the best available talent. Overtime, this might produce more parity in domestic leagues, as more clubs develop and keep better domestic players. But how will this work when the roots of any club’s success are so clearly tied to capital? To change the roots of success, FIFA will need to change the form, or the rules, of club’s development systems. So I wonder: in addition to the 6 + 5 rule will FIFA need to include additional stipulations that wed players more completely to the clubs whose development academies they train under? Will the richest clubs start vying for national talents at younger and younger ages? Will clubs need to start signing players before grade school to best protect their assets? I worry about the gross culture of speculation and ownership such policies might accelerate.

I’m not saying that the current capitalist player-market is without its own gross inefficiencies. Inequalities in spending cash produce reckless, imprudent investments. The war-chest-sized budgets possessed by clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City have caused salaries to balloon worldwide. And that these clubs operate at losses causes concern about the economic stability of the marketplace they are producing.

There are other ways that FIFA might encourage clubs to spend more prudently and equally that don’t involve limiting players’ mobility. American policies like salary caps and revenue sharing, ironic in their anti-capitalist purpose, come to mind. Another innovative policy I’ve seen thrown around in forums is that of a “Deficit-Free Incentive,” which would reward clubs financially for prudent spending and staying in the black. For these policies to work, however, multiple different teams and leagues with vastly different budgets would need to accept the same stipulations – an unlikely event. Also, more budget-equalizing policies would loosen the stranglehold that the richest teams have on European and domestic titles. While FIFA representatives suggest they want this, proposing the 6 + 5 rule as evidence, I’m not so sure they mean it. The 6 + 5 rule might create more parity, over the long term and only with additional stipulations that castrate clubs’ spending power, or it might not. Also, losing the biggest teams from the Champions League would mean revenue losses from those teams, and therefore losses for FIFA, which depends on the cash-generating powers of those teams.

The main argument for the 6 + 5 rule seems an emotional or moral one rather than an economic one. As Blatter suggests, the proposal would give identity and autonomy back to nation’s players and fans. Or, as Jose Mourinho says in a recent ESPN interview: “The world is global. Football is global. We cannot be too much concerned about nationalities, but I think the clubs, they must invest in their formation, in players made in the club, made in the country. I think this is also about the empathy between the team and the fans.” Mourinho, ever-political, saying nothing while saying everything, adroitly points to the tenuous balance that the proposal tries to strike between the necessity of national identity and the centrifugal forces of global appeal. Investing in national players and styles would help preserve the unique and beautiful cultures of the game. If more local players played for local teams, then local fans would feel more connected to their club and their homegrown players. At the same time, however, focusing on national culture leaves clubs disconnected from the real, world-wide marketplace.

This recalls the “Eat Local” Food movement, except it deals with humans and not vegetables. This is the problem. The nationalism that the law promotes inevitably produces an inequality of opportunity, a value that lies at the heart of the democratic world. As Brian Phillips points out in his brilliant blog, The Run of Play, the 6 + 5 rule would prevent an African or Asian player from getting the same “money, fame, and glory” as a less-talented European player simply by an “accident of birth.”

There’s also a major aesthetic argument against 6 + 5, and this is that it would immediately decrease the quality of the game at the highest level. The best clubs in the world have pooled the best talent money can buy. This talent, gelling and flowing together, produces mesmerizing soccer. The Big Four all play it on their day. And Barcelona, at least right now, plays it almost every time they step on the field. Sabotaging the talent pool’s of major clubs would lower the pinnacle of play, at least in the short term. How could FIFA divest world eyes of the highest quality game once these eyes have already seen such angelic purity of form? Is such brilliance really wrong?

The argument for lessening clubs’ talent in the short term relies on the theory that national talent will increase in the long term. Blatter suggests that redistributing the most talented players back to the clubs of their home nations will benefit the level of competition in these nations, which will produce more good players. I’m not so sure. This might be true in nations with weaker domestic leagues. But at the highest level, maintaining competition requires gathering world talent. If a nation’s best are competing against more of the nation’s best, instead of against the world’s best, how is this good for competition, and for the overall evolution of the game?

Blatter is right to point to the fading identities of clubs and national teams. This has been happening for a while. Arsenal, for example, plays with style that rejects longtime English directness and aerial attacks. They have only a few English players on their roster. They have many more fans outside of England than inside. In a way, this is sad. One of the aspects of soccer I enjoy most is the way it informs, and is informed by, national cultures. Different nations play with different styles – they identify to soccer differently.

But I question if preserving national identity and cultural autonomy is possible in such a globalized sport. One could make a strong argument that soccer serves as one of the most globalizing forces in the world, right behind the internet itself. More than any other game on earth, soccer causes cultures to collide and interweave. It accelerates diversity and erodes national barriers to communication. For most of us, soccer has made us more aware of foreign cultures, languages, and peoples. Such awareness, placed in global context, makes us more sensitive to our own individual and cultural identity.

I fear that a law that functions to preserve nationalism indirectly, by placing strictures on players’ international mobility, stunts the game’s power to connect us all. Preserving national identity is important, but FIFA needs to rework its policy so that it more positively affects the roots of the game, more directly affects financial and competitive equality. As it stands, the proposed 6 + 5 rule would do more harm to the global game than good for any national one.◊

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