Football competitions are a billion-dollar business. And they are getting bigger and bigger: in the current 2024/2025 season, the Champions League will be held in a new format with more matches than ever before, while the greatly enlarged Club World Cup will also be held for the first time. The tournaments at the World and European Championships have also been or will be enlarged. It is no wonder that others also want to earn money with football competitions and at the forefront of this wave of change is a new attempt to revive the so-called Super League.
This is the first post in a series on the topic of football and the law. The series takes current developments in the sport as an opportunity to shed light on legal issues. In this first article, we examine who is allowed to organise football competitions and why the courts are involved. The article shows how litigation has developed and will continue to shape the law of the beautiful game.
When plans to establish a new European club competition called the „Super League“ were published by 12 football clubs in April 2021, this sparked so much resistance that the project was abandoned within a few days. Now the Super League is back: on 17 December last year, A22 Sports Management S.L. launched a new attempt to obtain official recognition from UEFA and FIFA for the new competition in a modified form and with a new name: "Unify League" (see reports by the FAZ and The Guardian). The project has prominent supporters in Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.
Who is allowed to approve football competitions? The question is not only economically exciting, but also legally. This is because there is no special state "football law" or European "sports regulation". Instead, football law is a self-imposed (internal) law of the clubs. So what prevents a private company, such as the initiator of the Super League – now Unify League- , from running its own football competition? The answer: it is the sanctioning power of the associations, in particular FIFA and UEFA. Football is organised by associations in the form of a pyramid. The individual football clubs are subordinate to regional and state associations and, in Germany, to the DFB as the supreme umbrella organisation. In Europe, the "Union of European Football Associations" (UEFA) stands above this. UEFA is in turn one of the six continental confederations of FIFA, the world football association. The upper associations exercise sanctioning power over the subordinate associations.
Although a club could decide to take part in a competition not approved by UEFA, such as the Super League, it would then face sanctions from the associations and could be excluded from playing in the Bundesliga, for example. The football associations can de facto make participation in competitive competitions impossible by imposing severe sanctions and thus act as "gatekeepers" for the market of professional football competitions.
However, the traditional set up, of football is increasingly being called into question. New court rulings in particular have contributed to this by further developing the application of competition law to football. The starting point for the changes was a commercial court in Madrid, which referred the matter to the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) for a preliminary ruling. The CJEU ruled that EU competition law also applies to football and that the monopoly position of FIFA and UEFA is in breach of European law. The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) is decisive for the question of whether football associations are allowed to prevent competitions. This regulates the European internal market, in particular the free movement of goods and services. As football competitions are a cross-border economic activity, the rules of European competition law apply to them. In the Super League case, the CJEU ruled that the sanctions threatened by the football associations constitute an unlawful restriction of competition. UEFA was exploiting its dominant market position in an unlawful manner. Instead, it must establish transparent and non-discriminatory criteria for the approval of new competitions. In May 2024, the Madrid Commercial Court finally ruled (see reports here by Sportschau and BBC Sport) that UEFA and FIFA had abused their market power by arrogating to themselves the power to prohibit participation in third-party competitions.
However, the special position of UEFA and FIFA was not completely abolished. On the contrary, the CJEU has even strengthened the role of football associations in certain respects. It has recognised that football has a special social and cultural significance. This, as well as the large number of national and international competitions, justify the standardisation and coordination of football by uniform associations. The associations may monitor compliance with the necessary rules and, if necessary, impose sanctions, without this necessarily constituting an abuse of a dominant position. However, the special characteristics of professional football do not justify UEFA and FIFA being allowed to prevent any competitor from accessing the market. The associations do not have to admit every competitor, but they are obliged to establish transparent and non-discriminatory rules for admission. The decisions of the CJEU and the Madrid Commercial Court therefore do not mean that new competitions cannot be prohibited by the football associations. The CJEU has not fundamentally abolished the commercial monopoly of FIFA and UEFA, but it is subject to stricter controls.
Whether the new UEFA rules meet the legal criteria of the CJEU is already controversial. Due to their economic importance alone, further litigation on the topic of football competitions be expected in the future. It is therefore right to speak of "Super League = Super Litigation" (as Jan Zglinski does in his article "Who Owns Football" which is well worth reading). At this point in time, it is so not clear if any games will ever be played in the Super League (or Unify League). But it is very likely that further court cases will be brought about.
Philipp Sahm
Chiara-Lucia Peterhammer
