What the hell is Sepp Blatter smoking? Last week, FIFA approved his “6+5” plan by a vote of 155-5. Under the terms of this plan, every club in the world would be restricted to a maximum of five foreign players on the field at a time (this, of course, is “foreign” for the purposes of FIFA, which has a residency requirement of five years in place for internationals, as opposed to many countries which have less stringent guidelines for actual citizenship). The vote itself makes little sense. Apart from a small number of countries that are net exporters of top-shelf talent and posses high quality leagues, everyone will be hurt if this goes into effect. Countries with successful leagues and large numbers of foreigners, like Europe’s “big 4” lose their talent pipelines and run the risk of making their leagues less competitive as the top clubs buy up all of the native talent. Countries with lower-level leagues are hurt internationally, because it makes it that much harder for their star players to play abroad (you can forget about ever seeing an African team make it deep into the World Cup). The only positive to come out of this ruling is highlighting exactly how ridiculous it is for the U.K. to have four separate national associations: Ryan Giggs would count as a foreigner for Man U.

All of these factors should have led to the outright rejection of this rule, but under Blatter (fyi: there’s a story on the FIFA’s website called “Joseph Blatter: Talent and Toil” and another one called “Blatter’s Sadness at Natural Disasters.” I’m sure Blatter hasn’t let his position go to his head, right?) , the spineless, gutless national associations fear his power to distribute money and favors more than they care about the game. Tellingly, the only entity to show any backbone in this whole situation is the E.U., an organization that can’t find it’s spine without writing a bill, reaching a general consensus over a period of several months, translating it into Estonian, and letting it languish in committee while they try to write another constitution. They’ve told FIFA that this plan is, well, quite illegal under E.U. law (proving that there’s more to E.U. law than those silly geographical restrictions on food…I know it’s not from Parma, but it’s still Parmesan cheese. God help us when E.U. technocrats get their hands on hamburgers.). Since this ruling is obviously directed at the major European leagues, if the regulation doesn’t apply to Europe it’s rather useless. Either Blatter is a moron (He’s not. He knows nothing about soccer, but he knows quite a lot about making money), or he’s drunk with power.

Assuming Blatter has compromising pictures of the entire European Commission and this thing actually passes, what can we expect? As mentioned earlier, we can kiss competitive balance goodbye. Looking at just the English Premiership, we’re confronted with two problems. Firstly, the big four clubs would just buy up all of the available English talent (except Liverpool, if rumors about their finances are to be believed). We can kiss the idea of a player of David James’s caliber suiting up for a squad like Portsmouth goodbye. On the other hand, if you’ve ever wanted to see 38 games of Peter Crouch, you’d probably be in luck.

That brings us to the second problem for those of us who watch the Prem: English players aren’t very good. Instead of being able to watch some of the best soccer in the world (and Chelsea), the Premiership would look a lot like Rex Grossman’s stat line: nothing but long balls (if you didn’t understand that, look here and don’t read it at work). I thought FIFA couldn’t do anything worse than making Jack Warner a vice-president, I thought FIFA couldn’t do anything worse than giving the World Cup to South Africa…apparently I’m an idiot.

-Ryan