“Find a still photo of football”

The Professional Football League (LFP) and the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) denounced this Monday before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that the Superliga seeks a “permanent snapshot of European football”, given that it is a project with fixed seats for 15 of the 20 clubs initially involved.

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Through the lawyer Yolanda Martínez Mata, the LFP argued that the European sports model is based on “merit”, understood as “a guarantee of access to or withdrawal from competitions based on the results obtained on the playing fields”, as explained during the first hearing of the case that examines whether FIFA and UEFA have abused their position by preventing the creation of the Super League.

For his part, the RFEF lawyer, Pedro Callol García, pointed out that the treaties of the European Union establish that the sport is based on an “open system of relegation and promotion”, a feature that opens the door for the teams of all tournaments to be renewed.

In the opinion of the lawyers, these principles collide with the essence of the Super League, a competition that, when it was created in April 2021, intended to bring together the richest clubs in Europe and provided for its 12 founding teams a fixed place each season.

Nine of the founders, including Atlético de Madrid, They decided to abandon the project after opposition from FIFA and UEFA and the reaction of a large part of the fans.

In addition to these twelve clubs with reserved seats, the initial idea also contemplated including three fixed guests and five more teams that, season after season, would access the tournament as guests on their own merits, based on the results obtained in their state leagues.

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“Reality shows that the clubs with the most historical victories they want to reserve a greater part of the economic benefits derived from its commercial exploitation”, indicated the lawyer of the LFP before the CJEU.

Martínez Mata denounced that, in the Superliga model, the founding clubs “combine commercial exploitation with the regulatory function and professional organization”and recalled that the participating teams themselves were called to be, also, the same shareholders of the project.

Meanwhile, the RFEF lawyer contrasted this system with the “absence of profit” that, in his opinion, exists in the functioning of the Spanish Federation“whose only motive”, he said, is “the redistribution of income generated by football in accordance with criteria of solidarity”.

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“With special attention to grassroots footballthe promotion of youth programs for football to support the disabled and to support women’s football,” Pallol García assured during the first hearing of the case.

However, this litigation reached the CJEU after a commercial court in Madrid raised to the European justice a preliminary ruling to ask him to determine whether UEFA and FIFA, as regulators of continental and world football, abused their dominant position in the sector when they opposed the organization of the Super League.

After the launch of the project, both entities threatened to suspend the founding clubss of the competitions that UEFA and FIFA organized -as is the case, for example, of the Champions League- and they also warned the players of these teams that they could expose themselves to a withdrawal of their federative licenses, which opened the door to veto them in World Cups or European Championships.