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The Premiership will resist any attempt to introduce Uefa's new quota of 'homegrown' players into England's top league. Under the new rules clubs' 25-man squads for the Champions League and Uefa Cup will have to include two players whom they have trained and two have been reared in the same country with the figures rising to four in each category by the 2008-09 campaign. Effectively, this limits English clubs to 17 foreigners (including Scottish, Welsh and Irish players), hardly a severe restriction, especially because any non-English players who have trained in the country for at least three years between the ages of 15 and 21 will count as homegrown. A match squad of 18 would therefore need to include only one home-reared player, assuming that all the foreigners were fit and available for selection. The measures are not as draconian as initially expected as previously it had been thought that Uefa wanted to impose a minimum of seven homegrown players in each 18-strong match squad. Uefa has acted after what it sees as a number of negative trends in European football, including poor performances by the national sides of the leading leagues, professional leagues ignoring grassroots sources and the tendency of the wealthiest clubs to hoard players. Uefa's 52 member associations will vote at the organisation's congress in Estonia in April on whether the rule should be extended to domestic competitions. Such a move is already opposed by the leading British and Italian clubs. Uefa might find themselves in legal difficulties if they imposed too restrictive a ruling on foreign players that contradicted the basic European Union principle of free movement of labour across borders. Uefa claims that the proposal is legal because it is a sporting rule to develop and promote young players rather than a restriction, but it is difficult to see what the treaty basis is for that claim. The Premiership are therefore probably right when they say 'it is extremely unlikely that such a rule will be introduced in our domestic competition.'
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