JOSEPH S Blatter wishes it to be known that he will be 72 tomorrow. And, he might add, that he has no intention of retiring. He has authored a torrent of pronouncements in recent weeks, and rather remarkably, all have been in touch with populist football sentiment.

There was no shortage of applause, nor indeed chortling, when the wily Fifa president witheringly kicked Richard Scudamore's witless 39th game proposal into the stands. The Barclays Premier League's chief executive is trying to regain face by coming up with an alternative, but the septuagenarian from Switzerland will be having none of it. When football required leadership to slap down this impertinence, Fifa's top man provided it unequivocally.

On Friday, in the opulent surroundings to which he has long been accustomed, Sepp Blatter held court to expound on this and other issues. Not on the menu at Gleneagles was the ISL court case which serves as a reminder of the darker side of his presidency, but there was plenty of food for thought on more straightforward matters.

Having endorsed the SFA's insistence that the British Olympic football team in 2012 will not contain any Scottish players, Blatter also promised to take up this newspaper's suggestion that Fifa should look at the issue of international teams being coached by foreigners. Where once only developing nations would employ the services of a non-national, it has now become common practice. Scotland, with dire consequences, followed the trend by appointing Berti Vogts, while England have had Sven Goran Eriksson and now Fabio Capello. Why, I asked the president, are there eligibility rules for players but not for their coaches? Is this not an anomaly? "If you had such a rule it would impede on the liberty of national associations to choose what is best," he replied. "But it is a good question. We have a (Fifa) technical committee on Monday and I will bring it up there."

However, in his third spell as president - he hasn't ruled out standing for a fourth in 2010 - Blatter's over- riding passion is the "six plus five"

proposal he will put to the Fifa congress in Sydney at the end of May. If approved, it will change the face of Europe's top teams, while for a man who likes the trappings of wealth and power, it is a strangely democratic reform.

Blatter wants a quota system, whereby all clubs would be obliged to start games with a minimum of six players eligible to play for that club's home nation. He will ask delegates in Sydney to vote for four home players in 2010, five in 2011, then six the following year.

When the president makes his mind up about something like this he tends to get his way. The EU and the clubs belonging to the now disbanded G14 group are the obstacles in his path - but such is Blatter's influence and self-esteem that he is confident of both circumventing EU labour laws and the gripes of the richest clubs.

"The specificity of sport and its structures has already been established at Lisbon in the EU treaty," he said. And as far as the clubs are concerned, he regards his own recent efforts, and those of his Uefa counterpart Michel Platini, as the start of a movement to have clubs and their governing bodies singing from the same hymn sheet.

"When we have peace in football and no more cases in the courts, then I'm sure also the European Parliament will understand that this dialogue is best confined to football and this is for the good of the game," Blatter continued. "Fans have a difficulty in that they are no longer able to identify with players in the team. Inter Milan played a game recently with only one European in the side. Most of the rest were from South America, and two were from Africa. This is not the essence of football."

Blatter, like the vast majority of fans who don't support the top clubs, dislikes the lack of genuine competition in the European leagues, where money decides titles and the same teams play for the championship every season. Whether his proposal, if adopted, would actually change anything is a very moot point given that the Old Firm's move towards fielding domestic teams has only resulted in other clubs being divested of their star players. But, you feel, he has a valid point and in Scotland's case the national side has been strengthened by recent developments.

In England, with Arsenal being a prime example, the trend has gone in the opposite direction. Blatter admits he hasn't talked to Arsene Wenger, but says he would like to. The Arsenal manager, one assumes, would only adopt the six and five proposal with a gun to his head, but Fifa's president is optimistic that even he can be brought round.

"He is the manager and wants to have the best results," said Blatter, "and he will go to the market because he has the money. But this is not the moral of football - if this continues the good players will only play with the rich clubs. How can you motivate young players when they know they have no chance to make the first team because the coach must win and he will go to the market?"

A day shy of his 72nd birthday, and even with the start of the ISL case coinciding with that, Blatter has lost none of his enthusiasm for a journey which started in 1975 when he joined Fifa, which then had a staff of just 11, as its technical director. He graduated to general secretary in 1981 and since 1998 has presided over a well-lubricated organisation employing over 300 people.

He can still, as he demonstrated at Gleneagles, work a room like few others. Only 24 hours earlier his latest thundering pronouncement had been that lifetime bans should be introduced for players making dangerous tackles.

That led the Sunderland manager, Roy Keane, to joke that he would have spent most of his career behind bars had the sanctions been in place earlier. But then none of Keane's victims were as agile as Blatter, a president who has been lunged at by opponents for the last 10 years yet emerged - so far at least - without so much as a bruise.