FC Sochaux within rights to deny Charlie Davies' medical clearance

Some clarification on this hot-button topic seems in order.

There’s a little misinformation afoot regarding Charlie Davies’ French club, FC Sochaux, and the U.S. team’s ability to bypass diplomatic immunity – or something like that.

A few people believe that U.S. Soccer had “rights” to Davies for a FIFA event no matter what officials at Sochaux said or did. I have to admit, I was under the same impression.

Typically, FIFA regulations do indeed stipulate that national teams can have their players for certain sanctioned dates without club consent. So, under normal circumstances, a national federation would clearly have the rights to a player during a World Cup.

All of this is relevant, of course, because Sochaux did not provide medical clearance for Davies to join the U.S. side.

As it turns out, there is a provision for medical exceptions. I talked to U.S. national team spokesman Michael Kammarman this morning. He explained that when clubs claim injury for a player, national team officials do have a right to examine the player for themselves. If there is further disagreement from that point, FIFA has established guidelines to deal with the dispute through hearings and such. Truth is, it never really goes that far. Generally speaking, people play by the rules.

Typically, a situation like this would arise if an important club match was in nearby conflict with an important national team date.  So, if the club were to claim “injury” and not release someone to the national team, rules stipulate that the player is then unavailable to the club over a certain period. If the player were to “recover” miraculously and participate in the club fixture, the FIFA police would act through fines, sanctions, etc.

As I said, everyone is aware of the policies and they generally play nice.

So bottom line here: Sochaux did have the right to deny Davies’ release. Yes, U.S. Soccer could have pressed the case and insisted on its own medical examination. But given the uncertainty of it all, and based on personal evaluations done in late April by

U.S. fitness coach Pierre Barrieu, the U.S. federation saw no point in making an issue of it.

In other words, if Davies is so far from being ready to contribute that Sochaux can’t even grant medical clearance, the chances that the young U.S. striker could contribute in a World Cup were virtually nil.  It was still U.S. Soccer’s decision to omit Davies from the 30-man pool going to camp, but it would have taken more than a phone call to push the issue with Sochaux.