dpa guest article by FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter

The last twenty years have seen a dramatic change to sport in general and especially to football. Football is no longer merely a leisure pursuit. It is a branch of an industry with gigantic turnover and vast financial resources.

That, in turn, has prompted considerable change to the context in which the game is placed. Governments and authorities frequently attempt to intervene in football in a regulatory capacity, with consequences which do not always best serve the sport.

The most recent examples of this are the proposed white paper by the European Union, and the concept of a European Agency for Sport, which has fortunately since been dropped. The international sporting movement led by the IOC under President Rogge, the associations responsible for summer and winter Olympic sports and the Confederation of National Olympic Committees, were unanimous in forming the opinion that any initiative launched by individual states or the EU must take account of the special attributes of sport, and should be confined to promoting these. Sport cannot become another platform for political activity.

Why not? Because sport is not the property of the left or the right, it belongs to everyone. Sport takes a longer-term perspective than politics. Building up a club takes years. Championship-winning teams do not emerge overnight, they are the result of a long-term process. Politics by definition requires rapid results, and a new government is always just around the corner.

Above all else, a footballer cannot be likened to a decorator or a factory worker. Football teams are not staff in the manner of employees of a given company. For this reason, FIFA has reached agreement with the international players' union FIFPro, taking into account the special needs and the specific situation occupied by players.

For this reason, it is also a mistake simply to apply European Union freedom of movement regulations to sport. It would be equally erroneous to establish a salary cap for footballers. If the EU intervened in this area, it would infringe its own founding principles, for example free market competition.

On the other hand, football can live with certain conclusions reached by the Independent European Sports Review because this report's fundamental conclusions underline the independence of sport and its need for autonomous regulation in a pyramidal hierarchy. The world of sport wholeheartedly concurs with a clear definition of responsibility in the continental and national spheres as well as at international level.

The world of sport also supports demands for legal clarification and a clear division between tasks to be undertaken by governments and by sports themselves. Sport requires support from government to solve problems where it does not possess effective mechanisms or influence, for example in the case of controlling global financial transactions leading to investment in football clubs from offshore finance centres.

Football is strong enough to organise and police itself. However, FIFA understands and also accepts the demands made of sporting authorities by political institutions for orderly management, and is prepared to implement this responsibility in football.

This is why the 2005 FIFA Congress in Marrakech unanimously approved the establishment of a taskforce entitled "For the good of the game". The taskforce and its three working groups, focused on finance, politics and football competitions, have reached wide-ranging conclusions, which were signed off by the 2006 FIFA Congress in Munich. We thus achieved consensus, because for the first time, all interested parties - the players, clubs, leagues, associations and confederations - were integrally involved in the process of forming an opinion. Simultaneously, delegates to this Congress resolved to punish unethical behaviour by protagonists in football via an independent Ethics Committee.

I would also mention that FIFA has continually improved its legal processes at association level in recent years, optimising the entire legal system and enabling final appeals to be made to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland in accordance with its own statutes.

FIFA, the confederations and associations are together capable of ensuring that football and government authorities, both in Europe and in the rest of the world, agree on ways of cooperation in pursuit of developing our sport. This is why the position of the football authorities must be reflected in any further work undertaken in European sport studies.

Solutions for football must be devised by football, and not by politicians.