The Striani challenge to UEFA financial fair play. A new era after Bosman or just a washout?

UEFA club licensing and fair play regulations (2012) consist of two sets of rules: on the one hand, the rules concerning the club licensing system (hereinafter referred to as “CLS rules”) defining the minimum sporting, infrastructure, personnel and administrative, legal and financial criteria to be fulfilled by a club in order to be granted a licence by a UEFA member association as part of the admission procedure to enter the UEFA club competitions; on the other hand, the rules concerning the monitoring process aimed at achieving UEFA’s financial fair play objectives (hereinafter referred to as “FFP rules”). The basic rule of financial fair-play is the “break-even requirement”. According to this rule “relevant expenses” of each individual club are not allowed to exceed the club’s “relevant revenue”. This means that a club should always aim to at least break-even, that is in a reporting period a club’s relevant expenses should be no greater than the club’s relevant income. In this context, in 2013 Daniel Striani, a football players’ agent, decided to challenge the FFP rules on the field of EU law by lodging a complaint to the Commission for allegedly breach of EU competition law. According to Striani’s lawyer, the target of the complaint is Art 57 concerning the break-even requirement. Such a rule is deemed to be an agreement between undertaking pursuant to Art 101(1) TFEU which generates several anti-competitive effects: it restricts investments; it fossilizes the existing market structure, allowing current top clubs to maintain their leadership and even to increase it; it reduces the number of transfers, of the transfers amounts and of the numbers of players under contract per club; it generates a deflationary effect on the level of players’ wages; consequently, it generates a deflationary effect on the revenue of players’ agents.