A Super League by stealth and Man City’s day in court: The battle for football’s soul starts here

Extended Champions League format and City’s legal battle are events of such epic scale and both will coincide with one another

The latest format of the wealthiest club football competition on Earth begins this week, the extended Champions League born of a decade of conflict in the European game, in an era of expansionism and the proxy geopolitical battles being fought in the sport.
It is quite a drum roll for the latest iteration of the elite level of the game. So much so that the administrators fighting these battles might have begun to think of themselves as the key protagonists. Uefa’s expensively produced trailer for the 2024-25 season featured Gianluigi Buffon, Luis Figo, Rodri and others – but its central role was modestly reserved for the shy Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin.
One day before the Champions League begins, the Premier League independent commission hearing the Manchester City case into more than 100 alleged breaches of the rules sits for the first day of what is expected to be 10 weeks. On one hand, the domestic English club game fighting for the right to govern the super clubs who are owned by the scions of fossil fuels states, private equity moguls, nation states. On the other, Uefa, with no option but to expand its most lucrative club games, at the behest of a rebellious core of Europe’s biggest clubs.
A mighty legal battle in the English game, with huge implications for both sides as well as the 19 other Premier League clubs who await the verdict. City deny the charges. On the other side, the biggest changes yet to what was once the simple knockout logic of the European Cup. Both are events of such epic scale, that it is hard to tell what might come first. The independent commission delivering its verdict on City, or the end of the interminable Champions League group stages with eight games per club and an additional knockout round into January.
In both cases the tail wags the dog. The Premier League has been obliged to defend its own right to sanction City. A verdict is expected soon in the two-week arbitration hearing brought by City on the legality of the rules governing associated-party transactions (APTs), which prevent owners disguising equity as income. The APT rules are fundamental to the operation of a robust system of financial controls, but all of it is up for grabs now.
It was the same on a smaller scale with Leicester City and their strategy of testing the Premier League rules to breaking point on an accounting point in their profit and sustainability (PSR) breach. The club were able to convince an appeal panel that the wording of the rules governing the timing of PSR breaches and the question of jurisdiction were poorly drafted.
But in terms of the intention of the rules, when they were agreed by all 20 clubs, the notion that the date of their year-end results would release them from responsibility from the competition that had financed them, was an absurdity. None around the table at the Premier League annual meeting at the start of the 2023-24 season would have agreed that was the intention – but that is the way it works now. Agree to the rules and then, if you cannot comply, challenge them.
Those rules are imperfect but designed to offer some equality, and they exist to protect the competitive balance which makes the league a compelling offering to broadcasters.
It is that splintering of the collective that is at the heart of it all. The biggest clubs have led the way and others have followed. Everton and Nottingham Forest may look at Leicester’s response to PSR and wonder if, in different circumstances, they might have launched a much more ambitious challenge. Going big seems to be the order of the day.
It would be easy to say that it all began with the Super League breakaway, although clearly many of City’s charges predate that. There may yet be more for Chelsea that go back further still, with a Premier League investigation into the Roman Abramovich regime still yet to decide whether there is a case to answer.
But the Super League rebellion showed what was possible. The way Uefa is run now, in partnership with the European Club Association, with whom it controls the club competitions and revenue in a secretive partnership, shows how delicate the alliance is. All that flowed from the threat of the breakaway and although it appeared that the rebellion was crushed, it was only ever appeased. Indeed much of what Uefa was proposing for the new Champions League even before April 2021 looked much like the short-lived Super League format.
At the end of this season comes the new Fifa Club World Cup. Although Fifa still has nothing to say about a broadcaster or host cities, the tournament will take place somewhere in the United States with 32 teams in June and July. This is Fifa’s big play to get its slice of the lucrative club broadcast rights market – an unprecedented expansion by the global governing body to challenge its biggest rival, Uefa.
Maybe Fifa feels it can make itself a more pliable partner to the restless super-clubs of Europe, especially those outside the Premier League, eager to seek bigger television revenue. Uefa will certainly do all it can to remain the operator of the biggest club competition in the world. Beyond that, the Premier League – which delivers television deals to its members far greater than any competitor bar Uefa – faces its own battles, starting this week.
It can feel like the biggest clubs are in control already. The governing bodies are there less to govern and more to resolve the disputes between their members as the fragile truce continues under rules that seem perpetually under challenge. Bigger paydays are what they want, lighter regulation for themselves, and tougher sanctions for their rivals. It would all be laughable, were there not so much at stake.