European football’s governing body UEFA has quietly relaxed its rules on multi-club ownership groups ahead of next season’s changes to its club competitions.
From the 2024-25 campaign, clubs under common ownership that are prevented from playing in the same UEFA club competition will now be allowed to play in different UEFA competitions.
For example, it is possible that one of Manchester United or Nice, both now under the control of Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his company INEOS, could play in the Champions League, while the other plays in the Europa League or Conference League.
The same would apply to City Football Group’s Manchester City and Girona, Red Bull’s Leipzig and Salzburg sides or Qatar Sports Investment’s Paris Saint-Germain and Braga.
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The relevant changes to UEFA’s competition regulations are found in articles 5.04 and 5.05, which come into force on 1 May.
Under the previous provisions of Article 5, which has not changed much in 20 years, clubs blocked from competing in Europe because they were under the control of an investor or group that controls another qualified team, were simply replaced by the next team from their domestic competition.
But now, Article 5.04 says a club that is replaced in one competition “may still be admitted to another UEFA club competition (i.e. in descending order: UEFA Europa League or UEFA Conference League) to which the relevant national association has access”.
The list of qualified clubs for the national association in question would then have to be adjusted, with the relevant cap for that association still being applied.
For England and the four top nations, that means a total of seven places, but any nation can earn more spots if one of its teams wins one of the three UEFA competitions but finishes outside the qualification places in their domestic league, as happened in the Premier League with West Ham last season.
They won the Conference League, earning them a place in the Europa League this season, but finished in 14th in the Premier League. This gave England an eighth team in Europe.
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While the change to UEFA’s rules on “the integrity of the competition/multi-club ownership” may not seem to be dramatic, the direction of travel is interesting, as it is clearly a loosening of the regulations, not a tightening.
With the number of clubs under common ownership growing each season, the integrity risks are obvious, particularly as the three men’s competitions are all moving to single-table formats and expanding to 36 teams each.
What was previously only a once-a-decade problem, is now likely to come up multiple times every season.
Last summer, Aston Villa, Brighton & Hove Albion and Toulouse were only allowed to take their places in this season’s European competitions when their owners put more distance between them and Vitoria de Guimaraes, Union Saint-Gilloise and AC Milan, respectively.
The latter three had already been cleared to play as they had finished in a higher position in their domestic leagues, which is how UEFA settles these disputes, but Villa and Brighton were only permitted to participate when their owners reduced stakes in their stablemates to below 30 per cent. Toulouse were allowed to play when Milan’s majority owner Gerry Cardinale quit the French side’s board.
Gerry Cardinale resigned from his position on the Toulouse board last June (Thos Robinson/Getty Images for The New York Times)
All three of the pairs of clubs were also banned from transferring players to each other this season, entering into commercial joint ventures or sharing scouting data.
UEFA has been grappling with this issue since the late 1990s, when English investment firm ENIC owned stakes in multiple clubs across the continent.
In the 1997-98 season, three of them — AEK Athens, Slavia Prague and Vicenza — all reached the quarter-finals of the Cup Winners’ Cup. UEFA blocked AEK Athens from playing in the UEFA Cup the following season, as Slavia Prague had a higher finish in their league. This prompted a legal challenge from ENIC that ended up at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
The result of that row was the drafting of Article 5 in 2001, which established the idea that “control or influence” over more than one team would not be allowed.
That left a lot of room for interpretation but the concept of “control” did not come up again until 2017, when RB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg both qualified for the Champions League. That prompted a tweak of the language, so that “decisive influence” was now the key issue. In practice, however, the Red Bull group was able to fairly easily create enough separation between the two clubs by moving some staff around and ring-fencing their budgets.
The current explosion in the number of multi-club groups, however, has raised issues that neither UEFA nor FIFA, which has expanded and revamped its Club World Cup, can ignore. So far, UEFA seems happy to take each case on its own merits, as we saw last summer. Whether that will be possible with the sheer number of cases that are likely to come up each year from now on, remains to be seen.
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