THE GREAT THING about football is the result: ultimately there’s a winner and a loser and the result is not something to be quibbled with.
Rulings at the European Court of Justice? Not so much.
The Court today issued its long-awaited judgement in relation to the Super League, the breakaway competition that convulsed the world of football in 2021 to which Barcelona and Real Madrid continue to cling. Uefa and A22, the company behind the Super League, have since been battling to control the narrative and portray the decision as a “win” for their side.
This result of today’s judgement is nuanced and complex but if you’re just here to know whether the Super League is suddenly back on the table, the answer is: no, not quite.
If you feared today’s decision would see football splinter off into different governing bodies like boxing and golf, then you breathe a sigh of relief, at least for now. The European pyramid structure overseen by Uefa still holds.
The Court hasn’t said that the Super League is a legitimate project and should be formed at once, but nor has it said it has absolutely no legal right to exist. Uefa and Fifa’s positions as football’s governing bodies have been endorsed, but there is at least the theoretical possibility the Super League can exist alongside them.
Let’s wind the story back a little bit. Barcelona and Real Madrid – the vestigial backers of the Super League after Atletico Madrid fled in fright at public opinion along with the English and Italian clubs - fought their corner by going to a Spanish court, who in turn referred the case to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), from whom they sought an opinion.
Before the ECJ, the Super League cited EU competition law to claim Uefa and Fifa were acting as monopolies and abusing their power in blocking them from pursuing the Super League.
You might remember that Uefa and Fifa threatened all-out war on the Super League clubs: Uefa said they would kick them out of their competitions, and Fifa vowed to ban Super League players from the World Cup.
Uefa and Fifa, for their part, argued before the Court they are not subject to EU competition law as any other business would be, as sport has a unique and specific position in the EU Treaty.
The Court ruled today that Uefa and Fifa acted unlawfully in threatening what they did back in 2021, because their proposed sanctions weren’t in their own rulebook and therefore were not subject to any kind of criteria and so were not “transparent, objective, non-discriminatory, and proportionate.”
The Super League took this as their victory, and so they rushed out to proclaim the end to Uefa’s “monopoly”, with Real Madrid president Florentino Perez saying clubs’ destinies were now in their own hands. This was the equivalent of the AC Milan players celebrating victory at half-time in Istanbul. Instead, Florentino and pals should have kept on reading.
The Court said that while Uefa and Fifa acted unlawfully in how they tried to block the Super League in 2021, that didn’t mean they had no right to block it. The Court said they have a right to impose penalties on any clubs seeking to join a breakaway competition, but that these must be “transparent objective, non-discriminatory, and proportionate.”
That the Court says Uefa and Fifa have to write new and proportionate rules relating to a breakaway competition is, of course, an implicit acknowledgement that breakaway competitions can exist, but that kind of ‘win’ isn’t exactly commensurate with the Super League’s bombast.
That the Court have endorsed Uefa and Fifa position as the sport’s governing bodies is not because they have some kind of unyielding attachment to them, either. They haven’t voted this way because they like the Champions League anthem or Gianni Infantino’s white trainers.
It is because of sport’s specific and unique position in the European Union: football is acknowledged as having significant social and cultural importance, partly because there are so many people involved in playing it across every EU member state. Today’s judgement links that fact with the pyramid structure, as everyone is technically competing under the same set of rules in an open system of merit-based qualification.
Therefore, the Court says, it’s legitimate for Uefa and Fifa to have the power to sanction clubs in order “to guarantee the homogeneity and coordination of these competitions within a global calendar and, in more general terms, to promote, in an appropriate and effective manner, the holding of sports competitions based on equal opportunities and merit.”
That notion of sporting merit may be why the Super League issued a new proposed format today, with 64 teams competing across three tiers, featuring promotion and relegation.
The league’s only public backers, though, are Barcelona and Real Madrid. Nobody else has signed up for it. In fact, all of Manchester United, Bayern Munich, PSG, and Atletico Madrid have today issued statements committing to Uefa. This serves as a reminder that what sank the Super League in 2021 was not the legal nuances of any European court, but public and political opinion. It faltered as too many people deemed it a bad idea, and most of Europe still thinks it’s a bad idea. So today’s judgement is no victory for the Super League. But it can hardly be a resounding victory for Uefa, either.
The biggest clubs have been extracting concessions from Uefa for years by threatening them with a breakaway – see the bloated and unpopular ‘Swiss system’ replacing the Champions League group stage from next season. The ECJ have today codified the theoretical possibility of a breakaway in the future, which will be a useful bargaining tool for the big clubs into the future.
And there’s another intriguing and potentially significant part to today’s judgement surrounding TV rights. While Uefa claim sport has a special place in the EU and should be exempt from competition law, the court say the organisation of competitions and the selling of commercial rights is “quite evidently” an economic activity.
Uefa and Fifa sell the TV rights to their competitions on a collective basis, which provides the majority of their income, and which is then trickled down to clubs and national associations like the FAI.
While the ECJ appear reasonably content that the collective selling of TV rights is appropriate and in everyone’s best interests, they are asking the aforementioned Spanish court to rule on the legality of continuing to sell these rights collectively. Any change to the collective sale of TV rights would be seismic for the whole of the sport.
But for now, the status quo holds. Uefa can breathe a sigh of relief: the Super League, at least as envisaged in 2021, won’t happen anytime soon.
But today’s ruling has not removed the possibility of any future breakaway competition, and Uefa may not be so lucky next time. The Super League collapsed not because everyone was convinced by Uefa’s project, but because it was a bad idea that was badly communicated.
Its genesis was the biggest clubs deciding they wanted more money, which lay it wide open to accusations of greed. Its backers are right about the uneven distribution of wealth in European football, but wrong to claim even more of that wealth for themselves.
Had Uefa ensured a more equitable share of money across the game in the last 20 years, there’s a possibility none of this would have happened. They may have survived the challenge from the top few, but there remains one big question. How might they deal with any future uprising from football’s lower classes?