UEFA, European football’s governing body, has quietly relaxed its rules on multi-club ownership groups ahead of next season’s changes to its club competitions.
From the 2024-25 campaign, clubs under common ownership that cannot play in the same UEFA club competition will now be allowed to play in different UEFA competitions.
For example, it is possible that one of Manchester United or Nice, both now under the control of Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his company INEOS, could play in the Champions League, while the other plays in the Europa League or in the Conference League.
The same would apply to City Football Group’s Manchester City and Girona, Red Bull teams Leipzig and Salzburg or Qatar Sports Investment’s Paris Saint-Germain and Braga.
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The relevant changes to the UEFA competition regulations are contained in Articles 5.04 and 5.05, which come into force on 1 May.
Under the previous provisions of Article 5, which have not changed much in 20 years, clubs prevented from competing in Europe because they were under the control of an investor or group controlling another qualified team , were simply replaced by the next team from their country. competition.
But now, Article 5.04 specifies that a club replaced in one competition “may still be admitted to another UEFA club competition (i.e. in descending order: UEFA Europa League or UEFA Conference League ) to which the national association concerned has access.
The list of qualified clubs for the national association in question should then be adjusted, with the corresponding ceiling for that association still applied.
For England and the top four nations this means a total of seven places, but any nation can gain more places if one of their teams wins one of the three UEFA competitions but finishes in outside the qualifying places in his domestic championship, as happened in the Premier League with West Ham last season.
They won the Conference League, earning them a place in the Europa League this season, but finished 14th in the Premier League. This gave England an eighth team in Europe.
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Although the change to UEFA’s rules on “competition integrity/multi-club ownership” may not seem radical, the direction it is taking is interesting, as it is clearly a relaxation of the rules, not of hardening.
As the number of clubs under common ownership increases each season, the integrity risks are evident, particularly as the three men’s competitions all move towards single-table formats and expand to 36 teams each.
What was once a once-a-decade problem is now likely to recur multiple times each season.
Last summer, Aston Villa, Brighton & Hove Albion and Toulouse were only allowed to take their place in this season’s European competitions when their owners put more distance between themselves and Vitoria de Guimaraes, respectively. Union Saint-Gilloise and AC Milan.
The latter three had already been allowed to play because they had finished in a higher position in their domestic leagues, which is how UEFA settles these disputes, but Villa and Brighton were only allowed to participate when their owners have reduced participation in their peers to less than 30. percent. Toulouse was allowed to play when Milan’s majority owner Gerry Cardinale left the French club’s board.
The three pairs of clubs have also been banned from transferring players between them this season, entering into commercial joint ventures or sharing scouting data.
UEFA has grappled with this problem since the late 1990s, when English investment company ENIC had stakes in several clubs across the continent.
In the 1997-98 season, three of them – AEK Athens, Slavia Prague and Vicenza – all reached the quarter-finals of the Cup Winners’ Cup. UEFA prevented AEK Athens from participating in the UEFA Cup the following season, as Slavia Prague achieved a higher ranking in their championship. This gave rise to a legal challenge from ENIC which ended up before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
The result of this dispute was the drafting of Article 5 in 2001, which established the idea that “control or influence” over more than one team would not be permitted.
This left a lot of room for interpretation, but the notion of “control” only returned in 2017, when RB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg both qualified for the Champions League. This led to the wording being changed, so that “decisive influence” was now the key question. In practice, however, the Red Bull group was able to create sufficient separation between the two clubs quite easily by moving some personnel and partitioning their budgets.
The current explosion in the number of multi-club groups, however, raises problems that neither UEFA nor FIFA, which has expanded and reorganized its Club World Cup, can ignore. So far, UEFA seems happy to deal with each case individually, as we saw last summer. It remains to be seen whether this will be possible given the large number of cases that are likely to occur each year from now on.
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(Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)