FRENCH FOOTBALL is a mystery. It can be, and has been in recent memory, magnificent. It can produce a Cantona, a Henry, and many more besides. It can make a fan of anyone who warms to world champions who happen not to be English, who play with a certain style, and who possess - do the French have a word for this? - panache.

But most people in France don't care. Attendances are abysmal. The clubs are poverty-stricken. The worst insult levelled recently at Serie A was from an Italian who said that the league has become "almost French".

As ever, France refuses to believe that any of this might just be the fault of France, or the French. A football doctor writes: "What we find is a very bad case, perhaps terminal, of Premier League envy."

Asian sports networks have not been falling over themselves to pour TV billions into the French game. This is unfair. Arabs and Americans and the rest do not jostle to bestow funny fortunes on football in France. This is unjust. English teams dominate the sport's premier European compet-ition. An outrage. "We" must therefore legislate. I will not bore you with the mechanics of the European Union's rotating presidency. Think of it as musical chairs. France is, for now, "in charge". Unable to solve a global financial crisis, Nicolas Sarkozy has decided instead to "reform" football. Or rather, his sports minister, Bernard Laporte, has gone for the soft underbelly of the English game.

That would be its finances, and its uncanny ability to transform millions into unspeakable debt and back again. Come the day that the "fit and proper person" rule is ever applied to the Premiership's motley crew of "investors" we can all raise the red flag. But it won't happen, and it is not, in truth, what the French have in mind.

Or had in mind. Our own UK sports politician is named Gerry Sutcliffe. You lose no points for never having heard of the chap. Nevertheless, it was his arduous task to get himself to Biarritz last week to defend England's honour, and the human rights of the var-ious American, Russian and Arab patriots of the Premier League. He won, so he says.

The dastardly French wanted "fairer" competition. "You mean," said Her Majesty's man (I paraphrase), "you want our clubs to open their books and submit to a new super-regulator' in the vague hope that a French team might one day achieve something?"

"More or less," as M Laporte did not quite reply.

No-one doubts seriously that English football is a bloated monster with the financial underpinnings of the average Wall Street bank. It is beyond argument, meanwhile, that no amount of pleading will turn the sport in France into a national obsession. So a choice: the unspeakable versus the unwatchable. Whose choice, and why?

Mr Sutcliffe emerged in Biarritz declaring victory over regulation. This was piquant, perhaps, in the week that 58% of RBS fell into public hands. Michel Platini, Uefa pres-ident, retorted that "financial fair play" should remain the aim for those contests within the aegis of his organisation. English football's foreigners had defied the foreigners. There will be no "super-reg-ulator", for now. But who really won?

Can you tell a public company how much it should pay in wages, or accept as debt? The government is wrestling with those very ideas, as applied to City bankers, even now. Laporte and Platini would call it "licensing", and grant themselves the right to allow or debar clubs according to their own notions of fairness and financial virtue. But the rhetoric can be translated, even from the French: how can we stop Man U, Chelsea, or Liverpool from paying the most, buying the best, and winning the lot?

Can you legislate? I doubt it. Football is now so big, at the top, as to require neither Uefa nor the EU. If push ever came to shove it would declare its independence from all regul-ation, and the TV money would follow like a trained pup.

Should you regulate? You should probably make the attempt. This week Alex Ferguson was mocking the super-rich aspirations of Manchester City, but his words were a little hollow. "Investors" have decided that they can buy the entire football universe. Who's to say they are mistaken?

Who, equally, can say that such a thing would be right for the very idea of football? French nonsense aside, the idea still matters. Despite his diplomatic "defeat" at Biarritz, Platini continues to claim that Uefa will persist with its plans for tighter licensing.

He argues that there must be limits to the extent to which the sport can be rigged by the big-money gamblers.

This much, we can applaud. In Platini's argument, pure cash is a performance-enhancing drug. It debases competition and attracts some very strange people.

But no-one, equally, ever said: "Michel, you're just too blindingly good. So we're going to attach 10 kilo weights to each of your ankles. Anything else just wouldn't be fair." There, I think, is your problem.