By Tony Attowood
It is difficult to know how likely it is for change to happen, but a new cross-European super league beyond the control of Uefa and Fifa has been announced by a company called A22 Sports Management. They are said to have close contacts with Real Madrid, although the exact details of that are not clear.
You might recall the last Super League which was formed and fell apart very quickly. Well, this is another one of those, but with a difference. That difference being that before they have launched THIS superleague, they have got serious legal advice as to whether Uefa has the right to stop them.
Now Uefa has put forward the view that all the footballing world agrees that Uefa is the organiser of European football competitions which cross country boundaries. So no one else can do it. The new guys say that is anti-competitive and thus anti-EU rules which are all based on the notion of open competition.
Of course, to some degree, that claim has always seemed rather dubious because it was just built on assertion, not any legal agreement signed up to by all the clubs. Besides, no one stops Bristol having two clubs, nor come to that north London (although one of those two also has the specific role of giving us all a laugh from time to time, what with their claim to be a BIG club despite having won the top division only twice since they joined the league in 1909.)
So it is not surprising that the EU has said “no” to the notion that Uefa alone have the sole right to organise club international tournaments across the continent, although in their normal imperious manner, that is still how Uefa act.
Now this latest development began in 2024 at the European Court of Justice, where the court was requested to rule on the claim by Uefa that it had the sole rights to set up any internal football competition across Europe, and thus the ability to veto any attempt by any other body to run its own competition.
In many ways, such a claim in a continent dominated by the notion of open competition in all areas seems quite ludicrous, but Uefa, (rather like Fifa beyond it, and organisations like the FA below it) likes to claim monopoly powers of the type that were deemed illegal in virtually every other walk of life in the last century. That they still do claim almighty power is down to two factors: they have suggested they will jettison any organisation that goes againsts their monopoly claims, and that unilt last year no one had bothered to take them up on the point.
The latest court ruling shows that in fact, Uefa had no power to stop the setting up of a competition as long as it wasn’t a closed league and did not run counter to the agreed international football calendar.
So with the European Court of Justice re-stating what was obvious in European law, the clubs have now presented their plans for a new competition. With a nice touch of irony, they call it the Unifty League.
In fact it is not just one league but actually four leagues, at the moment called Star, Gold, Blue and Uinion. There would be places for up to 10 English teams every season – three in top-tier Star, two in Gold and five across Blue and Union.
And although we don’t have the details yet, the suggestion is that the competitions would generate far more money for each club than the current European competitions do.
Part of this extra finance comes from the fact that the clubs and the competition would directly own their own TV streaming channel, which would offer supporters the opportunity to pay and watch advert-free, or have advertising on the channel
The idea is also that clubs would make more out of the competitions than they do at the moment out of European games, since there would be no “Uefa” type organisation taking out the giants’ share of the cash for its own projects and staffing.
Now in response to all such issues Uefa acts like a dictator, coming along with a ruling that everyone has to accept. There was a long row dating back to the 1920s as to whether the UK was actually made up of four separate footballing nations, or three (because Welsh clubs could play in the Football League) or one (because it is after all one country). Uefa gave a ruling, and the four parts of the UK play as separate “countries” (although this ruling was influenced by the fact that the four parts of the UK said they would simply bypass Uefa if Uefa said no.
This time, the battle is between the biggest clubs in Europe and Uefa, and Uefa is seriously worried that if it says “no”, then the big clubs will just do it anyway. Uefa would then have to order the Leagues to throw out their biggest clubs (which are, of course, the source of most of their money) and the Leagues would be unlikely to agree, since it would cut their incomes so dramatically. Uefa is pondering..
