Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-06-15-Speech-2-669"
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"en.20100615.35.2-669"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, in Mr Belet’s report on professional football, the European Parliament already stated that it is in favour of better regulation of the activities of sports agents, particularly players’ agents, and on that occasion, we called for an appropriate directive. Now, we once again find ourselves facing that issue.
The legal situation is unclear. Since players’ agents often work across borders, national legislation, even where it exists in the first place, is not a suitable method of controlling these activities. In turn, sports federations have limited legal scope of action. As non-state actors, they are not entitled to lay down extensive regulations. In 2000, FIFA, for example, had to relax its licensing procedure for agents for this very reason.
In 2009, the Commission published a study which pointed, in particular, to worrying connections between players’ agents and criminal activities. There was talk of money laundering, bribery, betting and tax fraud, amongst others practices. Such connections damage the integrity of the sport and are inconsistent with its social role. In addition, the study published by the Commission has found that the financial flows from players’ transfers usually lack transparency, which goes to explain the vulnerability of this system to the criminal machinations I have just mentioned. There is a particular risk, in the case of the agencying of young players, of the agent exploiting the youth and inexperience of players in, say, Africa, promising them a future in European professional football and then dropping them when no club can be found for them, leaving them stranded in Europe as illegal immigrants, without work or support.
Against this background, we need a European legislative initiative. That would enable us to regulate this issue uniformly across the EU, to plug the legal loopholes and to support sports federations in their efforts towards orderly and transparent agencying of players. In that respect, we should make it our particular aim, as we have requested in our motion, to ban commission payments for agents transferring underage players, so that we can eliminate every financial incentive for these kinds of unfair transactions, especially those involving underage players. I hope that we will get the support of tomorrow’s plenary for our motion today and, above all, that it will encourage the Commission to get to work on this issue."@en1
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