Clash of the titans

I am not a lawyer, nor a Chelsea fan, nor for that matter do I advocate poaching. However, FIFA's decision to impose severe sanctions follows the Premier League club's signing of Gaël Kakuta from Lens is an intriguing one. Further details of the ban can be found via

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/sep/03/chelsea-fifa-transfer-ban-gael-kakuta
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/c/chelsea/8236187.stm

A statement from FIFA appearing in The Guardian provides an indication of the sanctions that Chelsea and Kakuta face:

"A restriction of four months on his eligibility to play in official matches is imposed on the player Gaël Kakuta while the club FC Chelsea is banned from registering any new players, either nationally or internationally, for the two next entire and consecutive registration periods following the notification of the present decision," the DRC statement said. "Furthermore, the club, FC Chelsea, has to pay to RC Lens training compensation in the amount of €130,000."

Given Sepp Blatter's recent comments about player slavery in football, the nature of controls, and indeed the sanctions, imposed in this case bring one back to the debate about slavery, only from a different angle. Given the principles upon which the European Union is founded, and the state of the law in the Union, whatever the age of a player and whatever the investment a previous club may have made in the player, can the player's movements be controlled (in this case penalised) and his trade be restarined in such a way? Doesn't the player have a democratic right to do as he pleases? Afterall, surely all of us routinely switch jobs, even though an employer may have invested heavily in our development, while some of us may even have been actively 'tapped-up' by rival prospective employers? Are footballers any different to other employees? Is there actually anything in European law yet that defines the specifity of sport, which would thus make Chelsea, Lens and Kakuta exempt from normal EU laws? Is Kakuta therefore a slave? Or are Chelsea's (and, for that matter, Kakuta's) actions flippant, arrogant, selfish and dismissive? If all clubs were to behave in such a way, surely football would start to polarise even more than it has done already, with larger clubs benefitting? Surely poaching in sport - where the labour market is different to other labour markets - has to be treated in a different way? And what of the macro-political context to this penalty: FIFA attempting to control the actions of EU citizens and organisations in a way that is inconsistent with EU feedom of movement/restraint of trade principles (and therefore possibly illegal in itself)? And if the EU were to intervene in FIFA's ruling, wouldn't FIFA object to this? Based on precedent, could one extreme scenario be that FIFA suspends all EU nations from international football competitions until such time that the EU withdrew any threatened action that undermined FIFA's Chelsea ruling? Are the EU and FIFA on a collision course? And what about Chelsea? Not just 'any' club, but one owned by a Russian with strong links to the Russian FA and to the Russian government - FIFA v Russia? Could this be one hell of a legal/political clash of the titans?