FootBiz newsletter #14: Guardiola as England boss? An antidote to football's endless legal battles

Well, the international break is nearly over and Pep Guardiola hasn’t been announced as the new England manager yet.

I received a fair bit of incoming after my suggestion last week that the Manchester City coach might (maybe, possibly) take the England job at the end of the season but I was, in my defence, just thinking out loud 😅 

Since then, though, the interim boss (and previously red-hot favourite) Lee Carsley has somewhat shat the bed in a Nations League defeat at home to Greece. England did later win in Finland but it seems like the damage is done from Carsley’s press conference fumbles and the general mood around the camp.

To recap, Pep Guardiola hasn’t given any public indication of whether he will remain with City beyond the summer but we do know that key ally Txiki Begiristain won’t.

Hugo Viana will replace Begiristain, but the most impressive thing the former Newcastle midfielder has done in his career as a sporting director is hire Ruben Amorim as Sporting CP head coach.

One of the hottest young coaches in Europe, Amorim would seem a logical replacement for Guardiola if, y’know, he were to to leave at the end of the season… and they now have the perfect man to bring Amorim to City and under whom he was worked well.

Add in that the FA is really dragging out their process to replace Gareth Southgate, and notably no formal interviews have taken place with candidates despite the application closing date being ancient history, and it does feel like they’re waiting on Pep’s decision.

If the FA can get through the November international break (ugh, another one?) then there aren’t any more England games until March, when Guardiola would almost certainly have made a decision on his future and communicated it publicly.

And if the best coach of his generation - and one of the most influential in the history of the game - is in any way a live possibility then you have to string things out and wait for him to give yourself a chance, don’t you?

Table of Contents

• More legal battles

• FIFA concede and consult

• Mad(rid) neighbours

• Mbappe’s international ‘break’

• In focus: ECA and UEFA

• M&A Murmurs

Anyway, pretty steady stream of legal/regulatory sort of news this week so I’ve tried to keep it as light as possible.

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More legal battles

We were already tracking a raft of legal battles being waged across top-level football in Europe but now we have another, after FIFPro teamed up with European Leagues, an organisation that represents most of the biggest domestic leagues in Europe, to file a formal complaint against FIFA.

The complaint was filed at the European Commission in Brussels and alleges that FIFA abuses its dominant position in unilaterally controlling the global football calendar.

Interestingly, the complaint doesn’t seek punitive or financial damages, they merely want to be involved in the process of building the calendar and consulted on any changes going forwards.

This action has been in the works since the summer, but pressure on FIFA over its expanded Club World Cup has increased in recent weeks while players have also threatened to strike over workload. Rodri, the first elite player to speak publicly about the possibility of a strike has since sustained a likely season-ending ligament injury after playing an eye-watering schedule of games.

In the tribunal ruling on the Premier League vs Man City case that was published last week, the retired judges spoke of a broader trend of increasing scrutiny of ‘double hatters’ who regulate but also financially benefit from putting on competitions.

With FIFA shoehorning an expanded tournament into a schedule that hasn’t got the stretch, something will eventually have to give.

After defeats for the Premier League, UEFA and FIFA in recent months, governing bodies are also on something of a cold streak. One to watch.

Read more: Inside FIFA’s pitch to save the Club World Cup

FIFA concede and consult

On a related note(?) those hoping FIFA might be more open and consultative will have been enthused by Monday’s announcement that world football’s governing body is planning on “a global dialogue” over changes to the transfer system and particularly around players breaking contracts.

Earlier this month, the European Court of Justice ruled in favour of former France midfielder Lassana Diarra, who had sued them for damages over how FIFA handled his departure from Lokomotiv Moscow and subsequently blocked him continuing his career with Belgian side Charleroi.

The court agreed with Diarra that refusing to allow the midfielder to join Charleroi in 2015 showed that its rules "impede the free movement of professional footballers wishing to develop their activity by going to work for a new club" among other things.

"FIFA sees the Diarra decision as an opportunity to keep modernising its regulatory framework, which has been one of the declared objectives of the Fifa president since 2016," said FIFA’s chief legal and compliance officer Emilio Garcia Silvero.

Mad(rid) neighbours

A fun story from Spain, where residents of the area around Real Madrid’s Estadio Santiago Bernabeu launched legal action against the club in which they allege that the stadium’s license to host events actually expired in 2001!

Last month, Real Madrid cancelled all concerts due to take place at their newly expanded stadium until at least March of 2025 after noise and nuisance complaints from residents in the wake of Taylor Swift’s brief swing through the Spanish capital.

The residents group bringing the action were so angry about events going on late into the night that they used decibel meters to prove laws were being broken and made several requests to see the original stadium license, only being granted it on the fourth attempt and discovering that it had expired over 20 years ago.

Real Madrid deny the claims and say they are working on the noise issue.

Mbappe’s international ‘break’

Escaping the noise of Madrid, Kylian Mbappe didn’t have the quiet international break he had been hoping for, and news can be expected to come to a head today with a tribunal set to rule on his legal action against former club Paris Saint-Germain by the end of the day. 

To recap, Mbappe left PSG for Real Madrid in the summer, turning his back on a contract that was costing the Ligue 1 champions some £180m per year by the end (£63m salary, £27m bonuses + tax obligations under French law).

In signing for Madrid on a Bosman, PSG claim he broke a contractual obligation that he wouldn’t leave for free and so they withheld nearly £50m that he believes is rightfully his. We will find out today whether legally he was correct or not.

But all of that is stuff we’ve covered before.

What is new is that during this international break, the newly-crowned captain of France Mbappe wasn’t playing for Les Bleus because he needed rest - according to coach Didier Deschamps - despite playing in Madrid’s last two games before the break.

So some in France didn’t react well when the masked striker was pictured in Stockholm, out partying, during France’s game with Israel. According to Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Mbappe and his friends ate at restaurant Chez Jolie before going to nightclub V where they had a private room.

This caused a bit of hubbub in France, but nothing enormous. More embarrassing than career-ending, and had the same story panned out with Jude Bellingham and England or Jamal Musiala and Germany it would also have probably ruffled a few feathers with those who don’t think ‘resting with an injury’ can coexist with ‘going to a Stockholm nightclub’.

Deschamps once again defended Mbappe, for what it’s worth, but the real shock arrived over the weekend when French outlet RMC echoed reporting in Sweden that a woman had reported being sexually assaulted at the hotel where Mbappe and his friends had stayed - albeit without accusing them of anything.

Mbappe responded on (what used to be) Twitter, calling it “FAKE NEWS” but then with the killer line:

“It’s becoming so predictable. And as if by chance, just before the hearing.”

Whether Mbappe wins in his claim against PSG may well be known by the time you read this newsletter, though the expectation from legal voices consulted by FootBiz is that it gets kicked up to a higher court for a decision further down the line.

But relations with his former employer, who he appears to insinuate are planting stories about him in the French press, appear to be at an all-time low.

Not the most restful of breaks for one of the world’s biggest stars.

In focus: ECA and UEFA

Often in politics, the most interesting bits can be read between the lines and so is also true for the politics of football.

The European Clubs Association (ECA) began its life as the G14, a lobby group of 14 elite European clubs who wanted more influence over UEFA policy. Now, the ECA and UEFA are so closely intertwined these days that it is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins, and yet it was still a surprise to see them inexplicably extend their existing MoU with UEFA until 2033.

The criticisms within football (and even from member clubs we spoke to) have been that the ECA only looks out for the elite clubs, and while notional representation of smaller sides has increased, there are no voting rights for smaller clubs who have watched the richer clubs systematically claim a greater portion of the pie in recent years - mainly through new distribution mechanisms that include historic performance and coefficient calculations. Owners and executives also criticise a lack of transparency.

A rival group looking to serve the interests of every club in Europe called the Union of European Clubs (UEC) has been growing in its numbers and meets in Brussels today with a focus on those two pillars; transparency and representation.

That clearly isn’t lost on those who met in Athens last week, and presumably it is the UEC who the ECA were thinking of when, in a statement, they highlighted that they are “the sole representative body of clubs in Europe recognised by UEFA and FIFA.”

But their attempt to depict themselves as the friend of the little man wasn’t helped by Club Brugge chairman Bart Verhaeghe, who upon his election to serve on the ECA board gleefully announced on Friday:

“Our chairman has been unanimously elected as a director of the European Club Association (ECA), the organisation that represents the largest and most important clubs in Europe.” 

It very much seemed like the quiet part being said out loud, which brings us to one of the louder speakers in football.

La Liga president Javier Tebas is lined up to give the headline address at today’s UEC event, and knowing his combative nature and capacity for eye-popping quotes, you’d expect there could well be fireworks.

Tebas previously told the Guardian: “I’m fed up with hearing that the ECA represents the European clubs. It represents the elite clubs in Europe.

“We try to defend solidarity but that is not just 10% of the clubs. It has to be everyone. Is the ECA open? Not to vote and not for decision-making. Which is what is really necessary.”

Concerning the earlier story on FIFA’s legal challenge, the general secretary of the World Leagues Association and FIFPro's director for global policy will also both be speaking at the UEC forum.

M&A Murmurs

Serie A club Monza are for sale.

The club was once famous for having more bankruptcies (2) than seasons in Serie A (0) when it was bought by Silvio Berlusconi’s holding company Fininvest in 2018, but the former Italian prime minister reunited with his favourite executive Adriano Galliani to get the club back to Serie B in 2020 and then to the top flight for the first time in their 110-year history in 2022.

After successive mid-table finishes (11th, 12th) the company that Berlusconi passed to his five children is now in talks to sell the club.

In their most recently filed accounts (2022/23) Monza made €33m revenue, the lowest of any side in the Italian top flight, but Serie A’s distribution of TV money is as follows:

• 50% equal share

• 30% performance (15% last season, 10% last 5 years, 5% historical)

• 20% media profile (8% TV audience, 12% fans)

And so the club should be closer to ~€45m in revenue now.

New York-based financier Mario Gabelli has been linked with a €60m purchase in media reports.

Not a club this time, but a broadcaster.

Reuters last week reported that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) had been in discussions with DAZN over a $1bn investment to take a 10% stake in the company.

Industry insiders have long speculated that the sports streaming company could be a target of the famously deep-pocketed Saudi fund, noting its position of influence as a significant international broadcast partner but also its eye-watering annual losses of around $1bn.

Given the way Qatar has used the influence of BeIn Sports as part of its broader football strategy, it is not hard to see why DAZN might make sense for a country lined up to host the World Cup in 2034.

DAZN is already partners with the NFL, the UEFA Champions League, the Premier League, Serie A, La Liga, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 among a slew of other high-profile sports properties but has no clear path to profitability.

“DAZN has held conversations with at least three investment funds in recent months over various strategic partnerships and is seeking an overall valuation of $10 billion to $12 billion in a potential deal,” according to Reuters.

While DAZN and PIF did not respond to Reuters before publication, the Saudi fund has since come out and denied the report. While it makes sense to us, they clearly don’t agree… for now.