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By Tony Attwood
Now, when that headline above says “football explodes,” you might think that is a bit of an overstatement, but I’ll give a quick summary to show why I think this is the moment that everything might well be about to change.
And in explaining this, I am going to get into a bit of a step-by-step account, but I hope you will stay with me, for as far as I know, you might not be finding this story and its implications on other football sites, unless they have stumbled upon the same set of statements and drawn the same conclusion as I have.
I start with Section X in the Premier League Handbook, which is the heart and soul of issues of dispute resolution. Any argument between clubs, players and the league over anything at all, has to be resolved by arbitration – and that arbitration is handled by the footballing authorities. This means football runs itself. If a club doesn’t like what another club is doing it has to go through footballing authorities to resolve the dispute – it cannot go to a court of law, as any citizen within the UK has the right to do.
This means in turn that if those running football don’t like the way something has evolved, they solve it themselves, irrespective of what the law of the land says. Put another way, football in England is beyond the law.
Now of coruse any player, club or other organisation can go to court to challenge this, but they don’t because that will mean they would be kicked out of their league and out of the FA.
The rules then go on to set out in detail an arbitration and dispute resolution procedure, including rules on settling disputes between clubs, players and leagues. And this is all-encompassing – it even includes the rules about appeals and contractual disputes, points deductions, how the results of an appeal are published… everything.
But now it seems La Liga has registered a complaint with the EU Commission in which it says Manchester City has broken EU Competition Law. And by doing so, this breaks the rule that says clubs and authorities can’t go to the civil courts. They have to go to a confidential, binding arbitration tribunal. So technically La Liga is now in breach of membership rules and could be thrown out of… well, La Liga!
But it appears the full complaint that Man City have breached EU Competition Law is one that can be brought because all European football competitions are subject to EU Competition Law, even though some clubs playing in the competitions are not in the EU. The European Commission confirmed that it received the complaint in 2023 and feels it is within its remit. The case was presented by Xavier Tebas Medrano, a Spanish lawyer and the president of Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional, the association responsible
In essence, the complaint centres on the fact that ManC received subsidies from the UAE, which distorted the competitive balance of the competition. Tebas said: “All they do is think about how they can avoid the rules and regulations. We have reported this to the European Union with facts and figures. Why? Because it’s an English team that is not part of the EU but they have commercial activities in Europe. It’s really important that all clubs are subject to transparency rules and governance and real competition in the financial and sporting side of their business.”
The argument is that the support for ManC disrupts the European footballing markets, allowing ManC to sign players they would not otherwise be able to sign.
ManCs defence that if they are sued over the issue, they would tie up English football in legal cases from which it could never escape, assumed the case would arise in the UK. The possibility of extensive counteraction against all of European football by ManC seems less likely as it would probably result in European football throwing all of the City Group clubs out of their competitions pending the outcome of the case
This case is of course, separate from the 115 charges brought by the Premier League against ManC and the two cases will continue simultaneously, unless one court decides to wait for the other, which seems unlikely.
As you may have noticed, most of the UK media have refused to cover the issue of the court cases against ManC in the past, and may indeed refuse even to contemplate this new development. And of course, there is nothing in the rules that says ManC can’t carry on playing during this period. But it does have the implication that ManC are now facing two separate sets of charges: one in relation to the 110+ Premier League guilty verdicts (which seems to have been on hold for months) and this one in relation to the EU.
Losing the EU case would probably not just mean a huge fine, but also ejection from Uefa’s leagues and competitions, which would leave ManC without clubs to play – except those from its own group.
