In the spring of 2021, with the UEFA Champions League approaching three decades of existence, an exhilarating new competition project has come to an end as European football’s trends change. Led by Florentino Pérez, President, as well as Andrea Agnelli and Joel Glazer, Vice-Presidents, the Superliga was born with the support of the 12 founding partners: Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City, Tottenham, Juventus, Milan and Inter Milan. More than four years later, the Champions League remains the ultimate continental competition – in which all the above-mentioned clubs participate – and the Premier League, unprecedented until its conclusion, has lost its strength on the ground, even though it relies solely on the support and defense of the club’s Altransa: Real Madrid.
Faced with this scenario, the club headed by Florentino Pérez and A22 Sports Management, the promoter that joined the Superliga project in 2022, last month threatened UEFA with a complaint worth around 4,500 million euros for “damages and harm” until Aleksander Ceferin, the head of the body that governs European football, agreed to negotiate a redesign of the Champions League.
At this stage, meetings between the two parties took place in a short period of time without moving forward in any direction. So much so that people who knew the talks felt that UEFA’s goal was precisely to keep empty meetings to kill time without making much progress. “Don’t fall again,” they then emphasized with strong words about the impending multi-million dollar demands from Real Madrid and A22. “It is up to UEFA to avoid this, but this can only be negotiated seriously.”
Florentino Pérez himself confirmed on Sunday at the Real Madrid Assembly that the white club had begun bureaucratic procedures to fulfill his request. “We did not come here to issue judgments, but to put them into practice,” he declared to his partners, when they confirmed that he had received special support from several clubs to relaunch the Premier League. “It is not normal that watching football on television has become increasingly expensive in the mid-2000s,” he added, defending the free-to-access replays that were broadcast on Dazn during the Club World Cup last summer. “An increasingly expensive product (referring to the model implemented by UEFA in the Champions League) aimed only at football fans,” he said.
For its part, the A22 group on the ground complains of “damage and harm”, although it has also submitted an official letter to UEFA. In the letter, the company run by German Bernd Reichart urges Aleksander Ceferin to comply with the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which ruled in December 2023 that both UEFA and FIFA had abused power to restrict the launch of the Premier League, positioning themselves as “arbiters” in the industry. European football and violation of European Union jurisdiction law. In addition, last June, the National Commission for Markets and Competitiveness (CNMC) opened an investigation into UEFA over its maneuvers to obstruct the start of the Premier League.
“Despite tough rulings from three European judicial bodies – including the International Court of Justice and the regional public in Spain – UEFA maintains regulations and practices in place that are in direct conflict with those judicial decisions,” A22 warned this month in a statement. “In the face of these errors, the only way forward at this moment is to demand compensation for the damages suffered, (so) UEFA now faces a scenario of significant complaints from both clubs and A22.”
However, it should be noted that the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union, to which the Premier League was awarded, became concrete in 2023 that such a sports project, called the Unify League since 2024, “does not necessarily need to be approved” as long as it is supposed to be implemented in the UEFA ecosystem, that is, in the current scheme of European football.