UEFA Lead At Half Time In Battle With Clubs - 27/05/2006

A report by a special European Commission task force on the future of football has given Uefa a 1-0 half time lead in its battle to maintain its power over the top clubs. But a lot could happen in the second half and any extra time. The report of the independent football review headed by former Portuguese minister José Arnaut goes into considerable depth of a number of issues affecting football (the report is available for download by following the link to the review on our links page).

The report calls for salary caps, tighter control of betting companies and players' agents and better corporate governance as well as pronouncing on the integrity of competitions, the risk of money laundering, ownership of clubs, trafficking of young players and both racism and xenophobia. The FA's requirement that a club director should be 'fit and proper' should be extended across Europe. The report wants the exemptions from competition and state-aid law provisionally set out in the Declaration on Sport in the 2000 Nice Treaty to be made clear and codified. Arnaut wants EU involvement in football to be made permanent by setting up a sports agency and a partnership with Uefa to govern the game. The report also backs Uefa's plans to compel teams to field a minimum of homegrown players about which English fans have mixed feelings, some fearing the long-term effect on the national team and others enjoying seeing the world's top players.

The three main actors in this drama face real dilemmas. The Commission has to consider whether shielding the game from a rigid application of EU competition law would be a Faustian pact, surrendering legal means of control over a sector for promises of jam tomorrow. The idea of clubs subscribing to a European code of corporate governance rings hollow when Italy is at the centre of a major scandal about match fixing. Uefa has to judge whether the prize of better protection from the rigid application of EU law is worth the price of tougher regulation that the document envisages. The top clubs' organisation, G-14, is to pronounce on the report next week, but is not expected to endorse it. But the question for G-14 is how can they best fight its proposals? One thing that should help them is that the blueprint, which is substantially influenced by UK thinking, would require no fewer than three European directives and some dozen other actions by Brussels to implement in full. Each of the directives would have to go through the Commission, Council of Ministers and Parliament and then be agreed by the Council and the Parliament under the co-decision process, offering plenty of opportunities to weaken and amend the proposals. It should also be remembered that this is a contest that has at least two legs. The far reaching Bosman decision was a judicial one and G-14 has succeeded in its attempt to get the Oulmers case about the release of players for international matches transferred from the Commercial Court of Charleroi to the European Court of Justice. Given that Uefa and G-14 remain at loggerheads, the publication of the report is just the latest stage in an ongoing battle which is of considerable importance for the future of European football.