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How European Soccer Powerhouses are Revolutionizing Antitrust Law

Posted by on Friday, January 31, 2025 in Blog Posts.

By Ellis O’Donnell; Photo Credit: Mateusz Slodkowski/Getty Images

In the evening of April 18th, 2021, Florentino Pérez, the President of Real Madrid Football Club announced the formation of the “European Super League” featuring twelve of soccer’s biggest clubs from England, Spain, and Italy.[1] The purpose of this new league was clear; for the richest and most powerful clubs to establish an oligopoly on the global soccer market by breaking away from their respective domestic leagues to form, as the name suggests, one European Super League.[2] However, this revolutionizing idea for changing the landscape of professional soccer was quashed in short time as fans, other teams, and professional soccer’s governing bodies immediately expressed visceral and unanimous disapproval of the proposal.[3]

Despite the failure of the European Super League to get off the ground the legacy it will have is at the crossroads of antitrust law and sport law given that antitrust claims became the central issues in the subsequent legal proceedings.[4] Shortly after the proposal for the European Super League collapsed the organizer of the Super League (European Superleague Company or ESLC) brought a claim before the Commercial Court in Madrid arguing violations of European competition laws.[5] In essence, this claim had the purpose of obtaining a declaratory judgment from the court that “FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) and UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) could, as a matter of EU law, not prevent the emergence of new football competitions.”[6] A preliminary ruling was granted which led to a non-binding opinion that largely was in favor of the respondents on the grounds that FIFA and UEFA’s practice of restricting the organization of other soccer competitions was not in and of itself a breach of EU competition law.[7] However this ruling was effectively only a place holder until the European Court of Justice (ECJ) could arrive at a final verdict.[8] When that verdict did arrive in December of 2023, to the surprise of many, the ECJ ruled against the preliminary ruling stating that the FIFA and UEFA statutes requiring prior approval of the creation of interclub competitions were unlawful.[9] The Commercial Court in Madrid reached the same conclusion when it issued its final verdict in the case in May, 2024 holding that it was unlawful for FIFA and UEFA to prevent the establishment of new competitions and prohibiting players from playing in them.[10] The result of this litigation is that it effectively symbolizes the end of the duopoly FIFA and UEFA had over the governance of European soccer.[11] The opportunity for competitive expansion in professional soccer is now greater than ever, and the general underlying antitrust principle that overarched this case could feasibly be applied to major American sports in the future.

 

Ellis O’Donnell is a second-year student at Vanderbilt University Law School. Ellis grew up in Boston, Massachusetts before attending Wake Forest University where he studied Politics and History.

 

[1] Dan Sansom, Florentino Perez: Real Madrid president insists European Super League will ‘save football at this critical moment’, Sky Sports (Apr. 20, 2021), https://web.archive.org/web/20210420064511/https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12280860/florentino-perez-real-madrid-president-insists-european-super-league-will-save-football-at-this-critical-moment.

[2] See Jan Zglinski, Who Owns Football? The Future of Sports Governance and Regulation after European Superleague, 49 E. L. Rev. 454, 458 (2024).

[3] See Lei Kuang & Zeyu Zhao, Antitrust restriction on football governance: the case of European Super League, E. Competition J., July 15, 2024, at 4. (“all but three clubs, namely, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Juventus, publicly announced their withdrawal from the ESL project within 48 hours amid political pressure and backlash from fans”).

[4] See id. at 22.

[5] Guillermo Íñiguez, European Super League Company and the (New) Law of European Football, 9 E. Papers 1, 2 (2024).

[6] Zglinski, supra note 2, at 454–55.

[7] Kuang & Zhao, supra note 3, at 4.

[8] See id.

[9] Id. at 5.

[10] See Sammy Mncwabe, Spanish court orders FIFA and UEFA to stop anticompetitive conduct in Super League case, CNN Sports (May 28, 2024), https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/sport/super-league-spanish-court-fifa-uefa-spt-intl/index.html.

[11] Cf. id.