Barcelona to appeal FIFA transfer ban, club says

BARCELONA (Reuters) - Barcelona will lodge an appeal to try to overturn a ban on participating in the transfer market for breaching rules on the international transfer of foreign under-18 players, the club said on Wednesday. FIFA, soccer's world governing body, announced earlier on Wednesday that it had banned Barca from the transfer market for two consecutive windows and fined the club 450,000 Swiss francs ($507,900). "FCB will present the corresponding appeal to FIFA and if necessary will submit the resulting resolution to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS)," Barca said in a statement on their website (www.fcbarcelona.es). "Appropriate precautionary measures to preserve the rights of the club" would be taken to ensure they were not kept out of the transfer market, the statement added. Barca said the rule they had been accused by FIFA of infringing was designed to prevent minors from being denied a proper education. The club argued that their academy, "La Masia", has been held up as a model of good practice and they had not breached any civil law. They had also been trying to get FIFA to reform the rules to make them more efficient at protecting minors, they said. "FCB creates people before they create athletes, a fact that has not been considered by FIFA, which has applied a penalty ignoring the educational function of our training program," they said. ($1 = 0.8860 Swiss francs)