The European Super League has lost with the preliminary hearing of the ECJ, but there are no ‘good guys’ involved in this whole sordid conversation.
It remains on a respirator, but the number of people standing around the bed is rapidly diminishing and it seems unlikely that it will be revived in anything like the forms that have been previously pushed upon us. The European Super League, the great land-grab attempted by a tiny number of Europe’s biggest football clubs, seems even further away than it has at any point since it was first sprung upon us in April 2021.
The preliminary report from the European Court of Justice is neither final nor binding, but there is really no way of spinning its publication as good news for Real Madrid, Barcelona or Juventus. Advocate general Athanasios Rantos found that FIFA and UEFA rules were compatible with European law and that, while the European Super League was free to set up a rival tournament of its own, it could not ‘continue to participate in the football competitions organised by FIFA and UEFA without the prior authorisation of those federations’.
Rantos was highly critical of the Super League project, stating that, ‘It would appear that ESLC’s founding clubs want, on the one hand, to benefit from the rights and advantages linked to membership of UEFA, without however being bound by UEFA’s rules and obligations’, but he also had a warning for European football’s governing body: ‘UEFA must avoid favouring its own competitions by unjustifiably refusing to authorise competing events’. Final judgement in this case will be published by the 15-member Grand Chamber of the ECJ in March, but it would be considered staggering were the final report to be much different to the preliminary one.
The first half of the 2022/23 season has hardly been a great advertisement for the European Super League. Most obviously, the ‘Super’ aspirations of both Barcelona and Juventus have hardly been helped by their teams crashing through the floor of the Champions League and into the Europa League in the group stages. Barcelona only took one point from four games against Bayern Munich and Inter. Juventus lost five of their six matches and were only transferred into the Europa League because Maccabi Haifa had an even worse goal difference.
These two clubs have hardly been a stunning advertisement for the alternate universe of a European Super League, either. Despite their well-known financial issues,…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Football365…