Europe’s biggest clubs start to protest about the way Fifa is wielding power

By Tony Attwood

It has taken us a long time to get there but finally, Europe’s leading clubs have made it quite clear to Fifa that the real power in football rests with the club that risk all the money and do all the work and not simply with with a bunch of bureaucrats sitting in Zurich.

The clubs have now told Fifa they would not to participate in Club World Cup tournaments unless Infantino stopped the Fifa Forward Enterprise scheme.    Infantino, in this regard, was accused of a breach of the memorandum of understanding about how football could move forward and where the boundaries of power between clubs, associations and Fifa actually lay. 

But more than that.  Within the protest there is the notion that that the clubs feel that the player release rules and the international match calendar have gone far too far.  Although this is never reported in the UK media, there are many clubs in Europe that are expressing their resentment of the way international bodies can remove players for international matches, but are not responsible for the consequences.

A part of the proposals from Infantino suggested that all the broadcasting rights and all  sources of income other than entry to the grounds would be handled by the FFE, a recently established $20 billion private commercial subsidiary, that Infantino had proposed to to sell to private investors.  That scheme has since been abandoned.

The clubs and associations have now demanded that Fifa agree that this will not happen in the future even though the there is such a joint venture active in Europe which was initiated last year under the name UC3.   The clubs have demanded that elements of the international game cannot be sold off privately either en masse or in sections.

Infantino has promised a meeting in the near future but this has not happened, meaning that the European clubs are still threatening to withdraw from the Club World Cup.  The CWC ran last season ran with 32 teams for the first time, but the objections now are because of the non-payment of the “solidarity money” from that competition to clubs that were not involved.  The statement from the European clubs said that this matter was of “serious concern and disappointment to EFC and our member clubs.”

Chelsea are understood to have received over £80m from winning the first edition of the Club World Cup but other participating clubs which were promised around £50,000 each have not received anything.

It is now also being noted that the agreement for clubs to continue to allow their players to be released for international “duty” expires at the end of 2030 and clubs will refuse to sign another such agreement unless the CWC issue is resolved.  Fifa has been accused of a breach of trust by the clubs by EFC committee chaired by the Paris Saint-Germain president, Nasser al-Khelaifi.  Indeed it may be that Uefa is starting to regret recognising this group while refusing to have anything to do with the Union of European Clubs which represents smaller clubs.

It is also remembered that back in 2017 there was a considerable amount of concern expressed in international football when FIFA dismissed the chairs of the ethics committee, Cornel Borbély and Hans-Joachim Eckert, who claimed that Fifa was attempting to set up its own independent ethics office which could judge affairs within Fifa without any external examination of the way that Fifa behaved.

Indeed overall there seems to be a growing willingness for Fifa to push through its own visions of how football should change and develop while all questions about the validity of such changes being judged by ethics committees that Fifa controlled!    Of course from the outside we can’t come to a detailed conclusion about just how far Fifa is trying to push its own powers and remove all disagreement or even debate, but it does seem to be an issue that needs both investigation and some clearly independent bodies taking a look at what Fifa does.  Although interestingly it seems to be an issue that the UK media don’t want to know about.