The overwhelming impression from Fifa's recommendation that the Carlos Tevez case should be referred to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne is that football's ultimate ruling body has no power to regulate the game. That is not quite true. Fifa merely has almost no power.

The Premier League has compounded this by handling the Tevez situation with consummate ineptitude. West Ham United and MSI, the company that owns the economic rights to Tevez, breached Premier League rules when the Argentina forward arrived at Upton Park alongside Javier Mascherano almost a year ago. When this became clear, the Premier League should have acted with authority and deducted points. It didn't and the morass deepened when it insisted, as part of the commission that fined West Ham £5.5 million, that any transfer fee for Tevez should be paid to West Ham.

MSI believes it has a contract with West Ham that entitles it to the 'economic benefits' of such a sale and with both parties insistent that Manchester United pay them for Tevez's services, a courtroom drama was bound to ensue.

So the Premier League passed the buck to Fifa. The world governing body looked at the case and realised that the only result that could come from making a ruling would be a writ from MSI or West Ham. Of course, it was never going to get to Lausanne. The patience of Kia Joorabchian, Tevez's 'owner', was already stretched and his writ, filed soon after Fifa's decision not to proceed, ensured that the matter will go straight to the High Court.

The lesson from all this? That the big clubs - and, to a lesser extent, the top players and their advisors - want no restrictions on their activities unless it suits them. They want to make money wherever they can, spend it on what they want and act in a manner that they regard as in their best interests regardless of what the FA, Premier League, Uefa or Fifa want them to do. And if any of those ruling bodies try to stop them, then a trip to the courts will determine whether it is a restraint of trade.

The big clubs do not want a Super League. They want the freedom to trade as they please, buy who they please and deal with whomever they want, even third-party owners. This battle for deregulation will be one of the themes in football in the next five years. The ruling bodies can only lose.