It shouldn’t surprise anyone when FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s comes out with abysmal ideas to ‘improve’ football.  After all, this is the man that suggested that women footballers wear tighter shorts, instituted automatic suspensions for those wrongly sent off, and has arbitrarily banned playing football more than 3,000 metres above sea level.

But none of these threatens to fundamentally alter the way the game is played (except in Bolivia, where the altitude rule is not going down well).  By contrast, his plan to indigenise all the football leagues of the world, by putting absolute limits on the number of foreign players that a club can field, is a characteristic absurdity that uncharacteristically threatens to undermine football globally.

No matter what the justification, there is a name for placing quotas based upon the origin of an employee: racism.  I’m staunchly opposed to so-called ‘equal rights’ legislation that bans companies from hiring whomever they want; if a club wishes to prosecute a policy of hiring only English or British players, that’s for them to decide.

Overseas, Athletic Bilbao’s cantera policy, of signing only Basque players, is much lauded for improving links with the local community and developing Athletic’s identity.  However, such a policy should be decided by each club, each business, by itself.  To do otherwise is to force individuals to make decisions that hurt themselves and that - in the aggregate - can only hurt the game of football, particularly at its top levels.

But, then again, maybe that’s just my own self-interest talking.  My season ticket at Arsenal sets me back over £1,200 a year: a steep price for a student, and one that I’m only willing to pay because it allows me to watch the most attractive and (for the moment) most success football in the world.  Arsène Wenger’s first-choice XI has a grand total of zero British players.

If the club is required to field five players eligible for the England team, as Blatter suggests, I, along with thousands of other fans faced with a hefty bill to watch top-flight football, will chuck it in and retire to my sofa.  That’s clearly not in the interest of me, of the players, of the club, of the Premiership, or of football as a whole.

To create a quota for home-grown players is fundamentally contrary to the principles of liberty and individualism, can only hurt the game of football by reducing the enjoyment by the fans, and will destroy what is otherwise a highly successful industry.  Furthermore, it institutionalises and promotes a form of racist autarky that will serve to move countries and peoples away from, not towards, each other.  Sepp Blatter, head of an international body with more members than the UN, should know better than to charge head-first into such a disastrous intervention.