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Loughborough University staged a workshop on this theme at the weekend with one of the page editors giving a paper on the G-14 group of big clubs. As football has become more of a branch of the media business in particular, these links are becoming the subject of systematic academic study with lawyers a key group of participants. We can only offer a short summary of the workshop here, but will provide a link to the web page where the papers can be downloaded. There was one paper which was not on football and it became clear how hard professional basketball in the UK had been hit by the loss of television coverage as a result of its switch to the failed ITV Digital venture. As far as EU policy is concerned, it was clear that there is an absence of joined up thinking and serious doubts about exactly what its legal competence in the area is - although that is not to say it has none. However, Uefa has been clawing back some of the ground it lost at Bosman, e.g., on rules relating to home grown players. Nevertheless, the text of the Nice Declaration on sport is not an open-ended invitation to Uefa to ignore EU law. Moreover, Uefa has to stop seeing the social dialogue in Europe as a zero sum game.
There was a lot of discussion about the role of the fan and about how the voice of the spectator is being marginalised. A real challenge is to organise fans effectively, notwithstanding the success of the supporters' trust movement in the UK. Although organisations like Supporters Direct are seen as something of a model for the rest of Europe, it is not easy to ensure that spokespersons are representative of fans in general. It was interesting to learn that one lower division club run by its supporters now typically paid players wages of £300 - £500 a week which at the lower end of their range is not much more than the national average wage. This illustrates how supporter run clubs have to adhere to a new financial realism, although in the case of that club one casualty has been its Centre of Excellence. A tightly run club may be able to offer the community less. More generally, it was agreed that attempts to use football to promote an EU identity were based on dubious legal footing and were unlikely to succeed in any case.
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