Madam President, I thank the Commission and Commissioner Kinnock for being available to make this statement following my request earlier in the week. While I welcome the fact they are here to make the statement, I am disappointed in its content. I am told I do not like football: I am a Manchester City season-ticket holder. I am told that the Commissioner has similar problems with a rumoured enthusiasm for Cardiff City which may explain some of the difficulties we both face. Nevertheless, I agree that the French Football Federation put on a wonderful feast of football. The French ‘rainbow team’ did much to confound the xenophobics and racists who, like Mr Le Pen and our unlamented former colleague Mr Mègret, believe that to be French is to be white. Yet importantly, there clearly was a breach of competition rules on a massive scale. Commissioner Kinnock talked about 180, 000 tickets being made available to football fans across Europe. That was after 600, 000 tickets were sold on a discriminatory basis. The organising committee deliberately and provocatively ignored early on the requirement that all citizens of the European Union be treated equally, and clearly breached Article 82 of the Treaty. In doing so, they massively increased their profits, selling tickets in corporate blocks as small as one. You could not buy a ticket by telephoning and paying FF500, but for FF5, 000 you could get the same ticket and the equivalent of a school dinner – I have had corporate hospitality before. If Commissioner Kinnock is asking me if I believe that the European Commission could actually help grassroots football better than the multinational corporations who actually rely on the profits, I would actually vote for the European Commission. It may not be a very popular move but I have seen very little evidence of the people who are making multi-millions of pounds out of football putting it back into football. They are putting it into franchising and other things. This also endangered the security of thousands of football fans. It turned tens of thousands of French men and women into amateur ticket touts. If they bought their allocation of four tickets each for a major match and sold them on the black market, they had enough money for two of them to take a two-week holiday in Australia. It was very difficult to imagine that French men and women would not pick up tickets and sell them in that way and clearly that was happening. In these circumstances, therefore, does the Commissioner not agree that football fans will think it is absolutely ludicrous, the EUR 1000 fine – which was about the black-market price for a ticket for England-Argentina – that ticket touts will think that this is good news and that genuine football fans will be disappointed? Can he not confirm that we could have fined the French football authorities something between FF 100m and FF 200m, which was something like 10 % of the extra profits they made? Does he not believe that the excuse that the organising federation no longer exists is actually a facile one when clearly it is the responsibility of the French Football Federation? Does he not agree that the message to the organisers of Europe 2000, to the organisers of Europe 2004 and the possible organisers of the Mondiale 2006, whether in Germany or the United Kingdom, is that they can ignore the rules, maximise profits and in the end, all it costs them is the small change? Should the Commission be treating football differently from any other multi-billion pound industrial operation? It seems to me that if this had been in the telecommunications sector or elsewhere, the notion that we would have come back with a symbolic fine in circumstances where people had increased their profits by £200m or £300m would have been as ludicrous as the symbolic fine appears to football fans.

Political group: PSE