LONDON, July 10: FIFA risks damaging world football by moving to less stringent regulation of players' agents, English Premier League Chief Executive Richard Scudamore said on Tuesday.

Scudamore said the Premier League wanted to see greater central control of the middle men who represent players but was “swimming against the tide” because FIFA, world football's governing body, was pursuing a more liberal approach.

“I think in some ways they have decided that it's too hard...on an international basis to regulate these things,” Scudamore told a British parliamentary committee.

FIFA's approach was to push the responsibility down to individual clubs and players for the behaviour of the agents they employed, he added.

“I don't want to be disrespectful to players but that is probably not their core competence,” he said. “There is an abdication really which is not good for the game.”

Scudamore told members of parliament the lengths to which the Premier League goes to check out the credentials of people buying into clubs in the lucrative 20-team league.

“We go in, we basically ask for declarations as to who the directors are, who the owners are, who the ultimate beneficial owners are of any sort of trust arrangements,” he said.

“We actually employ a business intelligence company, a covert business intelligence company, to go in at multiple levels within foreign jurisdictions and within our own jurisdictions.”—Reuters