Platini plea for values

UEFA President Michel Platini has made an impassioned plea for the safeguarding of the essential values and specificity of football and sport in an address to the Council of Europe's winter Parliamentary Assembly in Strasbourg.

Negative influences
In his address, Mr Platini expressed his concern that football's fundamental social and cultural values were coming under pressure from various negative influences. He called for preservation of the European sports model based on elements such as financial solidarity and openness of competitions with promotion and relegation, and urged the assembly's support for a draft resolution on sport's specific nature and the European sports model.

Powerful catalyst
"European sport has always been a powerful catalyst for social and cultural integration," said Mr Platini. "By virtue of my own origins I myself, like tens of millions of Europeans, am a product of this tremendous intermixing of peoples which has produced the Europe in which we live. I was shaped through and thanks to sport, and now I am trying to repay that debt by actively supporting these values that we hold dear.

Key aspects
"Two key aspects make the European model of sport both unique and completely fair: the financial solidarity between the different levels of European sport and the openness of competitions thanks to the system of promotion and relegation. Any attempt to undermine these two elements would sound the death knell of the fundamental relationship that exists between sport and society in our continent."

Sports' values
Mr Platini said that grassroots sport and its volunteers, together with European sports organisations, helped maintain the balance which enabled sports' values to be passed on perpetually. "It is this European model of sport which contributes in its own way to safeguarding local, regional and national identity, as well as to friendship and relationships between peoples and nations," he explained.

Explosion of interests
The UEFA President spoke of an "explosion of sectoral and corporate interests at both league and club levels in all team sports that are played professionally. These initiatives, which often attract enormous media coverage, are designed to benefit one element, particularly if it is powerful and rich, rather than the masses. Attempts are made to reduce a discipline into a show, to demean a sport in order to convert it into a product. It is becoming more important to make a profit than to win trophies."

Social problems
Mr Platini added that many social problems were reflected in sport, particularly football, since it is by far the most popular sport and attracts the most media attention. In addition to violence, he said: "Society has also passed other scourges on to the world of sport: money-laundering, match-fixing, illegal betting, racism and xenophobia, doping, child trafficking. The list is long but enables us to identify all the areas in which close cooperation between sports bodies and public authorities is both necessary and unavoidable." Mr Platini reflected that if professional sport were treated as a kind of commercial activity like any other business, all sporting activity would ultimately be viewed through the "terribly distorting prism of competition law."

Changes welcomed
UEFA's President welcomed recent changes to this situation: "The Lisbon Treaty has significantly altered the order of things by recognising the specificity of sport," he said. "In the European Union, there is a very strong, positive Franco-Dutch initiative on the European model of sport." Mr Platini said to the parliamentarians that the draft resolution asked, among other things, for the specificity of sport to be respected and the preservation of the European model of sport. He called for support for the Franco-Dutch initiative by EU representatives in their respective countries, which would consequently also help promote the Parliamentary resolution.

Positive effect
Mr Platini also highlighted the positive effect that the creation of the Enlarged Partial Agreement on Sport last year has had on European sport. "I would like to urge those countries which have not yet joined to do so," he concluded. The resolution was subsequently adopted unanimously.