Aggressive lobbying of governments by FIFA president Sepp Blatter will not alter the European Union's opposition to limiting the number of foreign players at football clubs, the bloc's top sports regulator said.

EU Sports Commissioner Jan Figel warned Blatter earlier this year that his proposals to limit the number of foreign players starting any club match to five breached EU laws on the free movement of workers.

But football's top official has been meeting politicians, senior sports officials and the European Parliament in recent months in an attempt to persuade them of the merits of his so-called "6+5" rule.

"As you know Sepp Blatter visited the president of the European Parliament... but the message is clear, 6+5 is not compatible with EU rules. I am not a lawyer, I am an engineer, but this is definitive," EU Sports Commissioner Figel told Reuters in an interview.

Any country which allows its football associations or leagues to introduce the 6+5 rule will face legal action by Brussels at the European Court of Justice - Europe's highest court - which could lead to hefty fines, Figel said.

Blatter argues that sport's social aspect means it should not be treated like other industries and therefore exempted from some EU laws because of its special nature - known as specificity.

"Specificity does not mean defacto exclusivity," Figel said. "Sport cannot be above or outside the legal space."

Blatter has been lobbying EU governments ahead of a meeting of sports ministers from the 27-member bloc in November in a bid to have them revaluate the Commission's position on 6+5.

But Figel was adamant that any such review would not happen until 2012 at the earliest when Brussels is due to evaluate the "home-grown player rule" of European governing body UEFA, which sets a quota of locally trained players at clubs but without any discrimination on nationality and is endorsed by the Commission.

UEFA's rule

"UEFA approach is much more compatible with legal space, we will see the full impact in three years after a gradual phasing in and we want to come back to this issue in 2012," Figel said.

"But this (home-grown rule) is a concrete rule, it's not theory and we have studied it as far as we can."

FIFA opposes the UEFA rule arguing it encourages recruitment at a young age.