Abstract. It is shown that for any family of finite groups of uniformly bounded rank, either (i) a subdirect product of these groups contains a non-cyclic free group, or (ii) there exists a single word w which is a law in each group, and moreover, if N is the length of the word, and r the maximal rank of each finite group, then each group is nilpotent-of-bounded class-by-abelian-by-bounded-index, with the bounds being functions of N and r alone. Additionally, various corollaries are derived from this result.