So why have we never seen players scoring goals like Ronaldo and Messi before in modern times?
Take Hugo Sanchez at Real Madrid in the 1980s: how many goals did he score in his best season? 38. He did not have the same team around him, because the budget of Real Madrid was not the same as it is now with Ronaldo and Benzema – or the budget of Barcelona now, who not only have Messi, but also Neymar and Suarez.
Isn’t it also true that the transfer rules were different then?
Now, with the Bosman rule, you can have all the best players in the same team. In the past, in Spain, you had Real Madrid, Atlético, Barcelona, Valencia – a lot of teams – and all the players were in different teams.
Now, more or less, the best players are in one or two clubs. The Bosman rule, not football, changed things.
Does this make it more difficult to promote national team football when high-level club football is so strong?
We are promoting national team football through the EURO qualifiers, and this will be more and more important, because people like the national teams.
What will be important in the future is to limit the possibility to have the best players in one or two teams. That is important for competition. If everybody is in one team, this is not so good, and [with] the Bosman rule, it was difficult at the beginning, but people know that now.
I totally support the agenda saying that we need more home-grown players, because it is not possible to fight on nationality. However, we have meetings in September with Mr [Jean-Claude] Junker and the European Commission to work on this.
It cannot be possible that the best teams should have all the best players, or competition itself is finished. At the moment, you have big clubs with a lot of money who can have everybody. We have to think about football in all of Europe – not only in two or three clubs.
Is this one of the achievements of financial fair play?
The clubs asked me to do something, because they cannot continue to pay this and because of the losses – we had a total of €1.7bn – so we had to do something, and we have done something. I think the principle is working very well. We have seen considerable improvements in the financial health of club football, with the aggregate losses of European clubs decreasing from around 1.7 billion euros in 2011 to a bit over 400 million euros in 2014 thanks to the financial fair play. So it’s a success!
Of course, one or two clubs are not so happy but, against that, thousands of clubs are happy.
