Representatives from the European Leagues intervened before the European Parliament’s Committee for Education and Culture (CULT) on Tuesday during a stakeholder consultation towards the European Parliament’s own-initiative report titled: Role of the EU policies in shaping the European Sport Model.

During the hearing at the European Parliament, the European Leagues stressed the central role of domestic competitions in the pyramidal structure of European Football, the need to enhance solidarity mechanisms as one of the main pillars of the European model of sport, while emphasising the need to improve the governance of our sport as well as tackling in a more inclusive and collective way the challenges our industry is currently facing.

The intervention of European Leagues Deputy General Secretary Alberto Colombo is available below in its entirety.

 

• At European Leagues we represent professional football leagues across Europe. We therefore represent the organisers of competitions at national level, who are also the employers that, together with players’ unions, guarantee contractual stability to our industry via social dialogue and collective bargaining.
• We are fully committed to the European model of sports, which is based on a pyramidal structure when it comes to the organisations of our open competitions.
• Domestic competitions are the foundation of this pyramidal structure. Such competitions are the backbone of the football and sports ecosystem. International competitions merely represent the very top of this pyramid. 
• The pyramidal structure means that sporting merit is the sole way to move in between the various levels of the pyramid through promotion and relegation in a fully open and competitive framework. We need to protect these core values of the European model of sports.
• The uneven distribution of financial resources in our industry represents a mounting threat to the structure of the pyramid. Financial and sporting polarisation is an ongoing and worrying trend. The recent expansion of international competitions (and their financial distribution models) creates not only an issue to the calendar for our domestic competitions. It also negatively impacts the competitive balance of domestic competitions and ultimately it cannibalises the financial, sporting and social value of domestic competitions. In other words, a few at the top of the pyramid are getting richer, while at the bottom of the pyramid sit dozens of leagues, hundreds of clubs and thousands of players, all struggling to get by. The risk that the very top of the pyramid is breaking off from its foundations is real and concrete.
• In this regard, EU policies should focus on enhancing a fundamental dimension of the European model of sports, which is the principle of solidarity. This means solidarity towards lower professional tiers but also at grassroots level. The distribution of some solidarity at the bottom of the pyramid, despite the improvement of this fundamental element of the European sports model, both in terms of values and mechanism, is far from being enough to compensate for the distortion created at the top of the pyramid.
• In this context, although respecting the core principle of the autonomy of sport, due to the specificity of our industry, the EU institutions could play a fundamental role in pushing sports organisations to improve their governance models.   
• The governance of our sport has been shaken recently by multiple interventions by EU Courts, all going in the same direction. The Courts are obliging international federations that sit at the top of the pyramid to perform their regulatory duties and functions in a transparent, objective, proportionate and non-discriminatory way in order to neutralise their conflict of interest and their dual role as both governing bodies (with responsibility towards the whole ecosystem and the whole sports pyramid) and competition organisers (especially considering that the competitions they organise are focused solely and benefit principally those at the very top of the pyramid). We need these court rulings to be fully respected and enforceable. 
• This is the core element of our Complaint to the European Commission concerning the International Match Calendar, based on competition law grounds, that we lodged against FIFA in cooperation with FIFPRO Europe. The core of our competition complaint is relatively simple and, in a way, quite conservative. In line with the EU Courts’ rulings mentioned above, we are simply asking the international federations to comply with EU Law by adapting their decision-making processes to address conflicts of interest between their regulatory roles and their commercial interests.
• The objective is to work towards a governance model where those decisions that impact the whole pyramid are taken in a collective way, taking into consideration the interest of all stakeholders. 
• We cannot continue to allow decisions that are taken unilaterally by those at the top of the pyramid that negatively impact the bottom of the pyramid. 

Keegan Pierce from LaLiga, a Member of the European Leagues, complemented the intervention of Alberto Colombo by stressing “the fundamental principle of Sporting Merit in the European Sports system, explicitly linking performance of clubs in their domestic leagues with participation in European and international competitions, while also respecting the successful model that has underpinned football’s sustained growth and global appeal for decades. Leagues which remain the lifeblood of our sport, where clubs and players compete on a weekly basis. Domestic leagues, which account for most of the European football revenue, contribute not only to the economy of member-states but also reinforce a sense of identity and cohesion for communities great and small across Europe. Good governance is crucial to solving the problems faced by European sport. As outlined by the European Court of Justice, decision-making in sport must be inclusive, transparent and take into account the full economic and sporting impact on the entire ecosystem”.

Throughout these principles runs the common thread of good governance, as an essential cornerstone of the European Sport Model. The European Leagues believe it is crucial, therefore, that the Commission develop a strategic framework on EU sport policy to promote the characteristics of the European Sport Model, as foreseen in the EU Work Plan for Sport 2024-2027.The Council and Parliament must of course play their role in this framework, and it is important that meaningful consultation with sporting organisations continue to take place.

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