By Tony Attwood
Now, when that headline above says “football explodes,” you might think that is a bit of an overstatement, but I’ll give a quick summary to show why I think this is the moment that everything might well be about to change.
And in explaining this, I am going to get into a bit of a step-by-step account, but I hope you will stay with me, for as far as I know, you might not be finding this story and its implications on other football sites, unless they have stumbled upon the same set of statements and drawn the same conclusion as I have.
I start with Section X in the Premier League Handbook, which is the heart and soul of issues of dispute resolution. Any argument between clubs, players and the league over anything at all, has to be resolved by arbitration – and that arbitration is handled by the footballing authorities. This means football runs itself. If a club doesn’t like what another club is doing it has to go through footballing authorities to resolve the dispute – it cannot go to a court of law, as any citizen within the UK has the right to do.
This means in turn that if those running football don’t like the way something has evolved, they solve it themselves, irrespective of what the law of the land says. Put another way, football in England is beyond the law.
Now of coruse any player, club or other organisation can go to court to challenge this, but they don’t because that will mean they would be kicked out of their league and out of the FA.
The rules then go on to set out in detail an arbitration and dispute resolution procedure, including rules on settling disputes between clubs, players and leagues. And this is all-encompassing – it even includes the rules about appeals and contractual disputes, points deductions, how the results of an appeal are published… everything.
But now it seems La Liga has registered a complaint with the EU Commission in which it says Manchester City has broken EU Competition Law. And by doing so, this breaks the rule that says clubs and authorities can’t go to the civil courts. They have to go to a confidential, binding arbitration tribunal. So technically La Liga is now in breach of membership rules and could be thrown out of… well, La Liga!
But it appears the full complaint that Man City have breached EU Competition Law is one that can be brought because all European football competitions are subject to EU Competition Law, even though some clubs playing in the competitions are not in the EU. The European Commission confirmed that it received the complaint in 2023 and feels it is within its remit.The case was presented by XavierTebas Medrano, a Spanish lawyer and the president of Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional, the association responsible