Euroscene: Who runs international football, anyway? As we head into a World Cup year, the club-versus-country conflict is likely to loom large if, as expected, currently ongoing litigation in Belgium goes all the way to the European Court.

Not for nothing, the issue has already been dubbed "Bosman II", in deference to Jean-Marc Bosman, the Belgian who a decade back changed the shape of football by invoking the EU norm of freedom of worker movement to challenge the restrictions of player contracts.

In the short term, the impact of the Bosman ruling was that an out-of-contract player has ever since been able to change club on a free transfer. In the long term, the ruling prompted wages to rise and contracts to be lengthened.

The "Bosman" of the current situation is the Belgian first division club Royal Charleroi SC. Until now, the name Charleroi had been best known to football fans as the Belgian town in which England met Germany in a much-hyped first-round game at the Euro 2000 Championship.

Charleroi are not among the big hitters of Belgian football but they had a good run last season, travelling just off the title pace all year long.

Mindful of their good league run, Charleroi last November refused to release their talented Moroccan midfielder Abdelmajid Oulmers (26) for a friendly against Burkina Faso. Fifa, however, intervened, supporting the Moroccan federation's right to call up the player for the friendly.

In the end, Oulmers played for Morocco, tore ankle ligaments and was out of football for seven months. Without him, Charleroi missed out on the lucrative Champions League, finishing fifth, 15 points behind champions FC Bruges.

In an industrial-relations tribunal in the town of Charleroi in September, the club filed a lawsuit against Fifa, suing for compensation for the lost Champions League revenue.

Legal experts familiar with the case believe this lawsuit could go all the way to the European Court, where Fifa could well be adjudged in breach of European Union competition law, just as Bosman's club FC Liege was held to be in breach of freedom-of-worker-

movement legislation in that historic European Court of Justice ruling in December 1995.

One of the lawyers handling the Charleroi case is Jean Louis Dupont, who acted for Bosman 10 years ago. In an interview with the Spanish daily AS last month, he spelt it out plainly: "In our view, Fifa is abusing its dominant market position. This is in breach of EU competition law."

Dupont argues that Fifa stage the most successful football show on earth, the World Cup, which next summer will generate 2.5 billion. Yet, he says, Fifa get the "main ingredient, the players, for free".

Fifa has said it will not comment on the case until the legal process has been concluded. When that will happen is difficult to predict but a first judgment from the Charleroi court could come next spring.

Significantly, Charleroi have received the financial and moral support of the G14 Group, comprising Europe's richest and most successful clubs, many of whom have long argued that they come off worse in the club-versus-country conflict.

In the last two months, Arsenal, Juventus and Real Madrid can point to a trio of Frenchmen - Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira and Zinedine Zidane - who have all been ruled out of key club games after picking up injuries while playing for France.

We pay their million-euro wages, say the clubs, but Fifa insists the national associations can take them from us for free, and even send them back with an injury, without compensation.

Yet, says G14 general manager Thomas Kurth, Fifa itself generates huge sums of money.

The argument is an old one. Fifa, with its 207 member countries, has long argued that, after costs, its profits are redistributed to poorer national associations and to the Goal development programme.

Underlining the point at the Fifa congress in Marrakech last month, Fifa president Sepp Blatter spoke of the "widening gap" between "football's rich and poor", suggesting national associations are losing the battle for control of football to ever-more-powerful clubs. The argument may be an old one but the Charleroi case could throw some new and potentially penetrating light on it.