Reconciling sport and the Internal Market
“The organising structure [of football] should comply with the economic legislation in the Internal Market”, said Toine Manders (ALDE, NL). While not wanting to affect the autonomy of sport, he wanted “a debate on how to comply with the economic aspects of professional sport”.
UEFA CEO Lars-Christer Olsson said “The internal market concept for sport is a false concept”, since there was already a strong framework to protect what he called the “existing European sports model”. Angelika Niebler (EPP-ED, DE) asked if it would be better to leave it to the associations to regulate themselves.
“Football has become big business”, said Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, president of Bayern Munich FC. With clubs like Real Madrid having hundreds of millions of euros at their disposal, “you can’t talk about fair competition”. And, he said, the capacity of Chelsea FC to sustain huge losses thanks to the wealth of its owner, Roman Abramovich, distorted the market. He said a new mechanism was needed to ensure “equality of competition”. Alexander Lambsdorff (ALDE, DE) asked about a salary cap or a draft system – as in some American sports, where the team at the bottom of the league gets first choice of promising young players – but Mr Olssen said such ideas “could never work in Europe.”
“Under the current UEFA system,” said Arnd Krüger of the University of Göttingen, “the rich clubs become richer”: the more money they have, the more they succeed. He called for a separate European league. Mr Olsson said this was unrealistic, with Mr Rummenigge also “not a fan of a pan-European superleague”, saying that “we [already] have a system, which is a good one. People in Germany want a Bundesliga, Italians want their Serie A, the Spanish want their Primera Division.”
Marketing Football
Competition law expert Temple Lang identified four issues which the EU should continue to address: rising prices of broadcasting licences; the threat of rights being bought up by one company; the risk that only important matches may be shown; and restricted new media broadcast rights. New media, he added, “benefit small and local clubs by ensuring that local audiences can see their favourite clubs on television”. Joseph Muscat (PES, MT) said that with pay TV and similar developments “a popular sport is becoming a luxury good”. Reacting to calls for more regulation, Mr Olsson said the EU was behaving “like an elephant in a porcelain shop.” He said the market should be left to regulate itself.
The fallout from Bosman
By scrapping the rules limiting the number of foreign players per club, the European Court of Justice’s Bosman ruling “led to total deregulation in European sport”, undermining fair competition and causing “considerable damage to football in Europe,” according to Frédéric Thiriez, President of the French Professional Football League. It caused an explosion in player salaries and transfer fees and an ever-growing gap between rich clubs and their competitors. He said it was “high time for Europe to respond” or European football “will go bust.” Jean Luc Bennahmias (Greens/EFA, FR said that as “things are not sufficiently regulated” there is no level playing field. Ivo Belet (EPP-ED, BE) proposed creating a special EU statute for football, exempt from rules on the free movement of workers. Mr Olsson said new UEFA rules guarantee a minimum of home-grown players in a football club - they should secure a brighter future for young talent and "keep the football dream alive".
Sport -- a vehicle for integration
Can professional football go hand in hand with social integration? Ibrahim Salou, a Ghanaian-born player in the Belgian football league, answered by citing his own experience. Only 17 when he was recruited to play in Germany, Mr Salou, who spoke no German and had no friends when he arrived, ended up playing in Belgium. Having learned Dutch and married a Belgian, he has come to appreciate that, as he put it, "football is one of the best means to bring people together."
