By Andrew Warshaw
February 21- FIFA presidential candidate Jerome Champagne has fired his first thematic salvo in his unlikely bid to take over from Sepp Blatter by focussing on the need to reform the current transfer system.
In a letter to all 209 FIFA member federations, entitled “transfers, players and clubs”, the 55-year-old Frenchman, who launched his campaign in London in January for the presidential election that takes place in late May 2015, says he wants to see a complete overhaul of the current regulations.
Champagne, who would probably only stand if Blatter himself decides not to go for a fifth four-year term, worked for FIFA for 11 years, much of it as deputy general secretary before being ousted in a 2010 political coup.
In the first of a series of theme-by-theme bullet-point proposals to FIFA members, Champagne, who has been acting as an international football consultant since leaving FIFA, proposes a package of measures which, he claims, would bring about a far tighter transfer system.
“FIFA’s regulation on the status and transfer of players needs to be updated,” Champagne writes. “It was negotiated in a climate of pressure and urgency and one has to understand the adjustment of that text is made necessary by the evolutions of football.”
In particular he wants to see the numbers of foreign players per club limited, within current freedom of movement rules; likewise transfers and loan deals during the mid-season winter window so that they don’t “violate the sport fair-play and distort competitions”.
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