Football’s ruling bodies tackle the EU over Bosman

Date: 20/04/2000

By Peter Chapman

Manchester United's marauding midfielder Roy Keane has just become one of the richest men in the game thanks to a five-year-old court ruling on a case concerning a little-known Belgian football player.

Keane, like the rest of his generation of soccer millionaires, has reason to thank the European Court of Justice for its landmark 1995 ruling on a legal challenge brought by Jean-Marc Bosman.

Bosman fought and won a case against his French employers whom, he complained, had unfairly stopped him from leaving the club even though his contract was up.

The Court said soccer, and sport in general, was an economic activity like any other - and was therefore subject to the same EU rules forbidding restriction on trade within the Union.

This meant that clubs could no longer hang on to players aged over 21 once their contracts expired and could not charge a fee for transferring out-of-contract players. Nor, said the judges, could national and Union-level sports bodies continue their practice of restricting the number of non-national players on their teams.

This ruling would have allowed the 29-year-old Keane, whose contract with football's most famous club United was about to end, to negotiate terms with a rival club - and amazingly, force the European champions to transfer him free-of-charge to any club willing to pay him enough.

That would have left Manchester United without one of the best midfield players in Europe, and with absolutely nothing in return. Given this, even the mighty Manchester club had little choice but to cave in to player-power and meet Keane's 80,000-euro-a-week pay demand.

Twenty kilometres down the road in the old mill town of Wigan, the local team is about as far from Manchester United in the soccer world as you can get. But Wigan Athletic company secretary Stuart Hayton says the ruling is having other, equally profound effects on his team, which is backed by an enthusiastic local businessman.

Hayton says clubs like his are starting to resemble the United Nations as they use the Bosman decision to fill their teams with foreign players of above average standard, provided they can meet their financial demands. "In our team we have a French player, a couple of Dutch and a couple of Spaniards. Prior to 1995 we never had a foreign player at all. It has totally changed football," he says. But he adds: "If a player is available 'on a Bosman' from a foreign club, his agent will ask for a higher salary and a higher signing-on fee."

The massive downside of Bosman, says Hayton, is that local players of average talents are "further down the pecking order", and poorer clubs which used to survive by buying players or developing youngsters and selling them on to bigger clubs at a profit are now struggling to survive.

It is no longer worthwhile for them to invest in training players if they then choose to leave at the end of their contracts and pick up a handsome pay check from their new employers. "In the past, if we bought a player from a rival club, it would benefit them. Now we are giving away €64-80,000 to the player, and that money is lost to the game," he explains. While clubs in the UK and other big leagues such as those in Spain, Italy and Germany have sought talent from abroad, analysts point to another less-heralded side-effect of the Bosman ruling - the 'brain drain'.

"If you look at some of the smaller leagues, such as Holland, they have seen a massive outflow of talent. That is a shame; it is money that seems to prevail," says Nick Batrum, soccer equities expert with City of London brokerage Granville Baird.

World soccer federation FIFA president Sepp Blatter and his counterpart at the European soccer federation UEFA Gerhard Aigner, insist that enough is enough. They have launched a determined lobbying campaign to try to persuade the EU to step in to counter what they see as the "negative effects of Bosman".

On the one hand, say the soccer chiefs, they are worried about the haemorrhaging of money from the grass-roots level of the game, and the Bosman ruling's alleged negative impact on the training of youngsters.

On the other, they want to be allowed to re-instate rules declared illegal by the ECJ to ensure "a better balance" between national and non-national players in teams, amid fears that the link between local fans and their teams are being eroded.

The soccer duo are pinning their hopes on getting Union governments to agree to add a new protocol to the EU treaty recognising the "specificity of sport" during this year's Intergovernmental Conference. These hopes were raised last month when the Portuguese presidency announced that it was setting up a working group to examine the idea, although the European Commission remains opposed to giving special treatment to sport.

UEFA lawyer Alisdair Bell argues that such a protocol would restore formal recognition of the role played by national ruling bodies - such as the soccer federations which make up UEFA's membership - in running sports.

"Sport is an economic activity but it has always been based on national lines," he says. "That causes problems at EU legal structures because every national element is meant to be eliminated in a common market. If you do that in sport, that is the end of national structures."

Bell argues that the protocol could also grant UEFA and its national members immunity from the tough Union anti-trust rules governing the joint sale of the lucrative television rights to broadcast their events, in recognition of their key role in the sport from organising top tournaments to redistributing cash to all members of the soccer 'family'.

"It is a tough job that UEFA has. It has to satisfy the big clubs, but also a statutory obligation to the whole game. It runs tournaments for women and under-18s, for example," he explains. "The only way we can organise these competitions is by using revenue from big events. People just focus on the Champions League, but forget that we run referees courses in eastern Europe."

However, FIFA and UEFA have already begun to attract a chorus of criticism from leading figures in football, including Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, who argue against a return to limits on the number of foreign players in a team.

Granville Baird's Nick Batram insists that UEFA and FIFA's clamour for a special protocol owes more to fears of losing their powerful grip on lucrative television and marketing rights to the industry, now worth billions of euro. The spectre of rival leagues and big clubs dealing directly with TV companies looms large and threatens to hit both UEFA and FIFA in their pockets. "They are in it for what they can get out of it," he argues.

Commission officials are also sceptical about the motives behind FIFA and UEFA's demands for special treatment. "They are looking for a protocol because they want monopolies for everything," claims one.

Culture Commissioner Viviane Reding's aides insist that existing EU rules would already secure anti-trust clearance for events such as UEFA's new Champions League format, provided that it can show that money from the sale of TV rights filters down to the grass-roots of the game, as promised.

In the meantime, they argue, the Union would be better served by focusing on other ways to combat the negative effects of Bosman within the existing EU rules. This could include urging clubs to set up special training contracts, which would force those signing up young players at the end of their contracts to pay a fee to their former team to recompense it for the investment it made in training the player.

UEFA and FIFA point out that it is the Union's 15 member states - and not the Commission - which must decide whether to bow to their demands for special treatment. But EU sources say there is little desire among governments to squeeze talks on a protocol onto the IGC agenda before the French presidency blows the final whistle on the treaty reform talks in December.

Given the need for unanimous approval for any change to the Union treaty, they say it would take a last-minute strike on the scale of Manchester United's killer blow against Bayern Munich in last year's Champions League final to get a result this time around.

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