Row looms over breakaway by regional soccer squads

Date: 15/10/1998

By Chris Johnstone

THE European Commission may be called in to act as referee in a looming conflict over whether regions can leave their national football federations and field their own teams in international games.

The prospect of yet another legal battle over football has been raised following a request to Jean-Louis Dupont, the lawyer who helped Belgian footballer Jean-Marc Bosman to overturn the sport's transfer rules preventing players from moving freely between clubs, to investigate whether breakaway teams can be created under football's current regulations.

Dupont has now delivered a preliminary report on the issue in which he suggests that the Spanish region of Catalonia could break free and field its own team in international games if it wants to.

"The sole conclusion of this report is that the actual state of the rules governing some international federations already opens up the possibility for an autonomous national entity to have a national team even if it is not a state under the usual terms of international law," said Dupont. He declined to reveal who had asked him to investigate the legal situation and added that the issue required a much deeper analysis which, for the moment, he had not been asked to carry out.

However, football's governing body in Europe, UEFA, immediately poured cold water on the idea. "A request for a separate body would have to be accepted by the Spanish federation first and that is not very likely," said a UEFA spokesman.

He added that Catalonia could not be compared to Wales and Scotland, which already have their own national football federations and are legally independent.

Another controversy involving sport, and one with such potentially explosive political significance, would add to the many headaches facing Competition Commissioner Karel van Miert's overworked officials at the moment.

They already have more than 50 such cases waiting in their in-tray and are attempting to draw up a general rule book on competition and sport to spell out what is and is not allowed.