Whether football fans like it or not, multi-club ownership groups are becoming the new normal. What’s more, there is now too much money in the ‘beautiful game’ to begin unwinding the clock. Groups like the City Football Group (Manchester City, Girona) Eagle Football Holdings (Crystal Palace, Lyon), INEOS (Manchester United, Nice) and BlueCo (Chelsea, Strasbourg) are here to stay.
The rise of multi-club ownership models poses a challenge for regulators. To pick the obvious example: How does a body like UEFA maintain ‘sporting integrity’ in a world where clubs owned by the same group meet in European competition? It’s a question in desperate need of an answer and, if UEFA is any indication, they are failing their exam.
European football’s governing body is now in the midst of several cases which are highlighting the difficulty and inconsistency in their approach to multi-club ownership regulation. This year’s FA Cup winners Crystal Palace are threatened with expulsion from the Europa League because of the presence of sister club Lyon, while tiny Irish club Drogheda United - who were until this year semi-professional - are facing the boot from the Europa Conference League owing to Danish club Silkeborg’s early June qualification to the same competition (both are owned by Trivela Group).
On its face, the answer is simple: two clubs owned by the same group should not be allowed to compete in the same competition. Indeed, that is UEFA’s stated position in its regulations. Only UEFA appears willing to bend those rules for some, and not others. And it looks like the bigger clubs are the ones getting the break.
In the 2023-24 season, Premier League club Aston Villa qualified for the Europa Conference League (it would go on to lose in the semi-final to Olympiacos of Greece). That same season Vitória SC, Villa’s relation in the Portuguese top division, qualified alongside it. To get around the conflict, the clubs restructured their affairs in a way that UEFA eventually approved. Similar agreements were found the following year for City Football Group (when both Manchester City and Girona qualified for the Champions League) and INEOS (where both Manchester United and Nice qualified for the Europa League).
In years past, UEFA would allow all relevant European competition to conclude before assessing any potential conflicts. And this made sense: why assess for conflicts until you knew you had one following the completion of play? The timings also meant the clubs could bring themselves into compliance following UEFA’s so-called June ‘assessment’ deadline. Returning to the Villa example, its restructuring was approved in late June 2023, nearly a month after UEFA’s so-called assessment ‘deadline’.
But these timings created a different problem; the brief period between the completion of play one season and the beginning of the early rounds of European competition the next competition year (often only one month) meant there was very little time for either the clubs or UEFA to prepare and assess any ownership mitigation measures. That’s why UEFA took the decision to pull the assessment date forward into mid-season for the 2024-25 season, to March 1, 2025.
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And this is where things get messy.
Bringing the assessment deadline forward gave UEFA more time to assess, but it left clubs guessing as to whether any mitigation measures would actually be needed. Should a multi-club ownership group incur the costs of changing its architecture on the off chance two of their teams qualify for the same competition? And why pull the assessment date forward to give UEFA more time to assess mitigation measures if the new mid-season deadline is now also meant to be a hard deadline beyond which no changes to ownership structures can be made? Why more time for UEFA but no flexibility for clubs (as was given in the past)?
The new timings also throw up entirely new problems. For example, what happens when a club is purchased in mid-season by a multi-club ownership group, leaving very little time to assess the situation and become compliant, if necessary? This is what happened to Silkeborg when it was acquired in December 2024 by Trivela (who own English club Walsall FC in addition to Drogheda United). And while Trivela knew Drogheda had qualified for the Europa Conference League by virtue of its miracle run in the 2024 Irish cup competition, Silkeborg was not looking to be a threat for Europe last December, and wasn’t until its last-minute qualification this month.
In the case of Drogheda United and Silkeborg, UEFA appears to be saying the rules are the rules. They are saying there can be no flexibility, despite Drogheda saying it had offered to make similar changes to those in years past that UEFA had approved for groups like INEOS and City Football Group. Then again, UEFA also approved changes to Nottingham Forest’s ownership structure in late April of this year, allowing the East Midlands club to enter European competition free of any conflict from its sister club Olympiacos. Why the apparent double standard? Why punish the minnow while giving a pass to the whale?
For its part, UEFA says it communicated the new 2024-25 rules in October of 2024, giving clubs plenty of time to adjust. Sources in European football say UEFA followed up directly with some multi-club ownership groups in December 2024 and January 2025, but not all. And not, it is understood, with Drogheda or its owners Trivela. But those rules weren’t formally adopted or made public by UEFA until February 26, 2025, a mere two days before the new assessment deadline. As far as those who hadn’t been contacted directly by UEFA knew, the assessment deadline for the upcoming 2025-26 European competitions was still June 2025, not March.
It’s no wonder Drogheda United are upset. What is the point of regulation if it is not consistently communicated or consistently applied? Why did some multi-club groups get priority attention directly from UEFA, while others like Drogheda had to rely on the message being passed along? Why could Aston Villa, Manchester City, and Manchester United make changes after an assessment deadline, while denying the same opportunity to Drogheda, a true underdog? One could perhaps understand UEFA’s unwillingness to yield if Drogheda were unwilling to make the requisite changes, but the club’s statement makes clear it had been trying for months to agree a plan with UEFA, only to have each of those plans rejected in turn.
What is UEFA event doing? Improbable cup runs like Drogheda United’s and Crystal Palace’s are what football is all about. So are last minute playoff match wins like Silkeborg’s. What problem is UEFA trying to solve? Let’s face it: neither Drogheda United or Silkeborg are likely to go far in their competition. They are not the threat to sporting ‘integrity’. The rules are designed to capture the power players, not the smaller ownership groups breathing new life into smaller clubs.
If UEFA just wants to give preferential treatment to the richest groups in football it should just say so. What it should not do is make an example of tiny Drogheda United just to prove they can enforce their regulations for once.
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