Hopes that clubs can be forced to field a quota of players from their home nation by using the new EU treaty are doomed to fail, according to the European Commission.

Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, is among those who have argued that because sport’s “specific nature” is recognised by the treaty, this would allow football to opt out from general EU employment laws. But officials in Brussels yesterday said that the EU Reform Treaty will not override a series of judgments from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that have established that professional foot-ballers are workers subject to EU law.

The EU Reform Treaty, due to come into force in 2009, simply commits the EU to “contribute to the promotion of European sporting issues, while taking account of the specific nature of sport, its structures based on voluntary activity and its social and educational function”.

An EU official said: “The reference to specificity in the new treaty cannot be construed as meaning that these provisions would allow for sport to have a special status allowing it to be exempted from the fundamental freedoms of the EU.”

The “specific nature” of sport extends to the right to select athletes for national teams and the right to limit participants in a competition but not to the right to dictate quotas of players for club sides, which would go against the freedom of movement of worrkers, he added.

It was the infamous Bosman case in 1995 in which the ECJ spelt out its rejection of player quotas. Chris Heaton-Harris, a Conservative MEP and qualified referee who heads the European Parliament football group, said that even though Blatter wanted to do “the right thing for the right reasons”, EU law clearly ruled it out. “This is like Gordon Brown promising British jobs for British workers,” he said. “It is impossible under EU law.”

He was more hopeful of success for Uefa’s scheme for squads in its competitions to contain eight “home-grown” trainees. An EU White Paper, published in July, seemed to give it its blessing. It stated: “Rules requiring that teams include a certain quota of locally trained players could be accepted as being compatible with the treaty provisions on free movement of persons if they do not lead to any direct discrimination based on nationality”.

The European Commission’s analysis of the scheme will be published in April. But Heaton-Harris gave warning: “It will not necessarily help to meet the Government’s aim to include more home-grown players in the big teams. You will get players like Cesc Fàbregas at Arsenal who have come through the club’s training scheme. It will take only one player who feels that he has not been picked for a club because of the home-grown quota to take it to the European Court and we will have another Bosman ruling.”

The Commission official added: “European football has probably never been as strong as it is today. Despite Mr Blatter’s opinion to the contrary, we believe that this strength has been supported, not hindered, by the free movement of football players.”

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