Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-09-07-Speech-4-041"
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"en.20000907.1.4-041"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, Madam Minister, I am speaking on the Zabell and Mennea reports today in my dual role as a Member of the European Parliament and as president of a professional basketball club which takes part in the major European competitions.
I wish, first of all, to express my thanks and congratulations to the two rapporteurs for their excellent work, and I should also like to highlight the action of our colleague Doris Pack, who paved the way for the negotiation of the protocol on sport which is annexed to the Treaty of Amsterdam.
Doping is a scourge from which sport has to protect itself. It undermines both fair play and genuine competition, and endangers the sportspeople who indulge in it. I am personally shocked by the ease with which young sportsmen and women can supply themselves with performance-enhancing drugs, without being checked at all, through the Internet or in certain countries of the European Union. Mrs Buffet has been tackling this issue in France, and I congratulate her for it. Nevertheless, this evil can only be rooted out if it is combated at European and global levels, and I encourage the Union to work with the World Agency to that end.
The European Union must also rise to the challenge of the modernisation of sport. The European Commission is questioning the system of transfers between clubs, believing it to be contrary to players’ freedom of movement. But the Commission is totally ignoring the distortion of competition between Member States, the social and fiscal disparity among professional sportsmen, which encourages the best of them to migrate to certain countries. We in France should know, because out of our pool of 22 players for Euro 2000, no fewer than 20 have gone off to play in other countries of the Union.
This phenomenon falls under the heading of social and fiscal dumping, but the Commission, for all its high principles, does nothing to combat it.
Professional sportspeople are also preyed upon by numerous agents who have exclusive rights to negotiate their employment contracts. Not only do the agents charge the players; they are also paid by the clubs, from which they extract commission, and I have first-hand knowledge of this. These agents hand over their protégés to the highest bidder, like common merchandise, after having whipped up competition for the players’ signatures in order to raise the bidding.
The abolition of transfers will induce agents to break their clients’ contracts several times in the course of a year in order to earn new commission each time a new contract is signed. The system of agents must be brought under control by the Union, or perhaps even scrapped.
I shall conclude by adding that sport must be brought within the scope of the Treaty Establishing the European Community. I therefore appeal to all those who govern us, particularly to the French Government, which is currently guiding the work of the European Union, to ensure that the Intergovernmental Conference to be held at Nice in December confers a share of responsibility for this matter upon the European Union and involves Parliament in the implementation of this initiative through the codecision procedure."@en1
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