Uefa won ESL battle – but ‘luxury tax’ points to new era of free spending
Hal-khelaifi’s new role as ECA chairman paves way for PSG to scrap fair play rules that restricted them
For the man who has signed Neymar, Mbappe and Messi, this is a fortuitous turn of events
The nine contrite clubs of the European Super League quietly came back into the fold on Monday, returning to membership of the European Club Association (ECA) that they once used and abused as cover for that failed breakaway in April.
It was, to put it bluntly, one more stage of the reintegration in civilised society of Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, Atletico Madrid, Inter Milan and AC Milan. Somewhere on the margins, the last remaining Super League proponents, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus, are still considering their options. It must be getting desperate out there, and while their fragile alliance is holding for now, it will not be easy to see the European game remodelled in their absence.
On Sept 10 and 11, the stakeholders of European football, its biggest clubs, and Uefa, will meet in Nyon to discuss the future – and everything is up for grabs. The end of financial fair play (FFP) as we know it, the abolition of the two places in the Champions League that were to be awarded post-2024 on coefficient – a built-in safety net for underperforming big clubs to qualify in spite of a bad season. All the rebel clubs will have a say, even the nine still on remand for bad behaviour, but only one of them can lead the ECA, which is the key negotiator for the clubs with Uefa.
The new president of the ECA, who succeeded Andrea
Agnelli, of Juventus, currently hanging out at the bandits’ outpost with Real Madrid and Barcelona, is the Paris St-germain president, Nasser Al-khelaifi. He is now the most powerful man in the talks with Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin in shaping the future of
European competitions, its calendar, its rules, its financial restraints on big clubs – or lack of them. The former Qatari tennis pro and television executive, who rose to be the face of the nation-state PSG project, is one of the game’s most influential people. Al-khelaifi had, to use the parlance, a good Super League. PSG’S reluctance to join the original breakaway, along with Bayern Munich, put him on the winning side and in prime position to step into the void in European football politics while a lot of expensive suits from a lot of famous clubs had their reputations torched. Now he finds himself as the lead voice in negotiating the replacement for FFP, the luxury tax which proposes a levy on any spending above a certain level. For the man who has signed Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi in the past four years, this is indeed a fortuitous turn of events.
The end of FFP most likely came with Uefa’s defeat by Manchester City at the Court of Arbitration for Sport last year, a governing body bested on appeal on the very rules it devised. Any lingering doubts were removed by the Covid shutdown of the game, and the necessary relaxing of FFP to allow owners to inject funds. For 10 years, Uefa, at the instigation of its former president Michel Platini, argued over what was legitimate spending and legitimate revenue with a series of upwardly mobile clubs, most notably twice with PSG and City. That is now over.
“We are operating in a new financial reality,” says Ceferin.
Yet at this crucial juncture, the old money clubs who sought to curtail the rise of the new generation find themselves sidelined. As he did over the post-2024 reforms to the Champions League that were in train before the great Super League betrayal, Ceferin typically prefers to negotiate
with the great mass of European clubs large and small via the ECA chairman. Once that was Agnelli. Now it is Al-khelaifi. The rest of the game awaits the outcome.
The luxury tax has its flaws. For a club with bottomless spending power its cost may just become another part of the calculation, along with inflated salaries and exorbitant agents’ fees. How will its redistribution work in preserving the balance of competition at the top of the game? A slice of a luxury tax premium will be welcome for a club struggling along with Covid debts in one of Europe’s lower tiers. But what meaningful difference would it make to the competitive edge of a club such as Borussia Dortmund, who will have to face on the pitch a free-spending, luxury tax-paying opponent? Uefa needs the big clubs back on side. There is still a legal battle with the Super League rebel three, and Uefa also needs to see off Fifa’s plans for a World Cup finals every two years and a potential Champions League rival in the expanded Fifa Club World Cup. Uefa won the life-and-death battle over the Super League, but it is in no position to dictate. It is both a competition organiser and a governing body, two roles that were more natural bedfellows in decades past. Now it has to balance curbing the spending of clubs with marketing its marquee competitions to broadcasters.
All this points towards a new era of loosening of regulation – even encouraging clubs to spend greater amounts, when a luxury tax is taken into consideration, rather than less. Ceferin is trying to obtain emergency funding for European football, a package of up to €6billion (£5.1billion) including loans. He is not in a position to discourage the wealthiest from spending money, especially if some of it trickles down to the hardest-hit. Uefa has always argued that FFP has created a more stable European football landscape over the past decade, even if it has proven difficult to enforce at the very top of the game. It has also not saved every club from making bad decisions, Barcelona being the most obvious example.
What replaces it will not be a move to less spending but more, while the Super League calamity has changed the political face of the game. When the music stopped in a year of betrayal and backroom deals, it is PSG and their chairman who find themselves negotiating the end of the rules that have restricted them the most.