O'Neill faces a fight to keep hold of Larsson

Henrik Larsson has put himself in the shop window for the January sales after refusing to reconsider his decision to quit Celtic when his contract expires in 18 months' time.

The 31-year-old striker, who has already scored 17 goals this season, has made it clear that he wants to test himself away from Parkhead. "I won't be signing another Celtic contract," said the Sweden international. "I'll have been here for seven years [at the end of his contract] and that will be enough. I'd like to play somewhere else for a couple of seasons, or depending on how my body feels, I might head straight home to Sweden."

While Celtic's manager Martin O'Neill will certainly not want to lose his most reliable striker, the club may well decide to cut their losses once the transfer window reopens in January. Chris Sutton and John Hartson, who scored twice against Inverness Caledonian Thistle in the Scottish Cup in midweek and has pledged his future to the club, have been impressive this term and, with Celtic already out of Europe, the time might be right to let Larsson go.

They could always replace the Swede with a local lad, just in case the latest pronouncements by Sepp Blatter, the president of world football's governing body, Fifa, about restricting the number of foreigners a club can field should ever come to pass. Arsenal's manager, Arsène Wenger, has dismissed the notion as a guarantee of "mediocrity".

Blatter's proposal to ensure that at least six members of each team come from the club's native country is due to be discussed at Fifa's player status committee meeting on Thursday. While it may be welcomed by some players' unions and may help the England national team, it has little chance of being introduced as it directly flouts European law on the freedom of trade.

Wenger made it clear that, quite apart from legal problems, it would be strongly opposed by leading clubs. The Frenchman, whose squad contains a sprinkling of English players in David Seaman, Sol Campbell, Martin Keown, Ashley Cole, Ray Parlour and Francis Jeffers, would be one whose selection criteria would be affected. He said: "When you play top-level football you must accept that the best players play. Or do you just want to give someone a run-out because they have the right passport?

"How can you justify that? It's not the best way to push football high up and it looks surprising to me."

He added: "If you suddenly tell Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira they can't play any more and push in some English players who are not as good, but have the right passport, I'd like to see how the fans would react. They pay a lot of money to see the best players and I can't imagine it should be right to accept mediocrity in the game."

Wenger also said he would not take his players off the pitch if they encountered racism. His Liverpool counterpart, Gérard Houllier, was reported to have made such a threat ahead of Liverpool's game in the Champions' League in Moscow earlier this week, but Wenger does not believe Houllier meant to intimate that he would consider such a course of action.

He is opposed to that kind of move. "I was surprised by Gérard's comments but I don't think he really meant that as it's impossible," Wenger said of his fellow Frenchman. "What I agree with him about is that we all want to fight against racism. But how you do it is a different matter. I don't think Gérard would take his team off the pitch during a game and I wouldn't either. That is giving an advantage to those who cause abuse."