The Diarra Ruling could change football forever – but it’s big clubs like Chelsea & Man Utd that will benefit
https://www.3addedminutes.com/sport/football/Chelsea/diarra-ruling-change-football-benefit-4810621
The Diarra case means that FIFA may be forced to change the way transfers work so that players can move more easily - but who benefits?
Depending on who you listen to, the success of the Diarra Case will either change football as we know it or achieve precious little. Between a likely appeal and what will likely be lengthy wrangling over what rules changes are actually required, we probably won’t see an immediate impact. But whatever the eventual outcome of this supposed successor to the Bosman Ruling, it’s likely to be the biggest clubs that are the real winners once again.
The roots of the case date back 10 years. Former Real Madrid, Chelsea and Portsmouth midfielder Lassana Diarra was playing for Russian club Lokomotiv Moscow when his contract was broken ahead of an attempted move to Charleroi in Belgium. Lokomotiv Moscow scotched the move when they insisted that the value of Diarra’s contract with them was owed by player and club – and the deal fell through as a result.
It's the mechanisms that prevented Diarra from moving freely between clubs that were being protested in a lawsuit which escalated from Belgium to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) – and a ruling announced on Friday determined that some of the rules set by FIFA which govern transfer dealings are unlawful, and both unduly restrict players’ freedom of movement between jobs and restrict cross-border competition.
What the ruling means
There are a great many specifics to work through and the case is in any case subject to appeal in the Belgian courts, but the ruling effectively demands that FIFA remove barriers to players breaking their contracts with clubs and ‘quitting’ just like the rest of us.
As it stands, there are various rules standing between players just leaving their existing contract and signing elsewhere. Firstly, both player and new club are currently jointly liable for the cost of the existing contract. Secondly, a ban on registering new players can be imposed by FIFA under certain circumstances. Thirdly and finally, national associations are expected to withhold clearance to play for players in such cases. All of these mechanisms upholding the old transfer system are specifically called out as illegal in the CJEU’s ruling.
In theory, this is a huge victory for the players, and it has been welcomed by umbrella players’ union FIFPRO. While the ruling does not impose any specific solution on FIFA, it was effectively force football’s governing body to change the regulations such that players have the means to quit their clubs and move to other teams. It should give players more power to determine their career paths and erode the ability of clubs to hang on to players when they want to move.
That’s why the ruling has been hailed – or damned – in some quarters as a New Bosman Ruling. There’s an interpretation of the ruling, should it hold up on appeal, that says players can simply leave their clubs and take up more enticing offers elsewhere as and when suits them. It is highly unlikely to be as straightforward as that, though.
Although the CJEU ruling determined that FIFA’s existing rules are unlawful, it does not suggest that it cannot impose some reasonable restrictions on players moving clubs repeatedly for bigger and better contracts. Some mechanisms which already exist to protect clubs may well become used more extensively, for instance, such as minimum fee release clauses, which are mandatory on all playing contracts in Spain, could perhaps be extended to the players themselves as well.
There could also be room for a tribunal system to determine fair compensation amounts for players who wish to leave ‘on a Diarra’, similar to that currently used to figure out compensation for clubs when youth players are poached now. A full-blown free-for-all is exceptionally unlikely given the wording of the ruling, even if the exact shape of the new regulations is indeterminate as it stands. Essentially, FIFA doesn’t necessarily have to make sure there aren’t any barriers at all to players moving freely between clubs, just to make sure that any barriers which do exist don’t restrict that freedom to an undue extent. FIFA themselves seem to believe that they only need to make small adjustments to the existing rules, although whether the courts agree with that assessment remains to be seen.
Either way, the real winners won’t necessarily be the players, although they will of course benefit and a new system could make it easier for players to get out of especially unfortunate situations at clubs that are maltreating them in some way. The real winners, as is almost always the case when a closed capitalist economic system becomes deregulated, are likely to be the same wealthy clubs who are hold most of the power.
How the case could change football
One thing that FIFA’s regulations did achieve was to provide some protection to smaller clubs, allowing them to set the terms by which their best players would leave to bigger, richer teams. As a long as a player was under contract with a team, they could determine what their required transfer fee was. Now, they may get an automated amount of compensation or even nothing at all, at the most extreme end of the possible consequences of the ruling, and nor would they enjoy any control over the timing of a player’s departure outside of transfer windows, which seem unlikely to be affected by this judgement.
Now, players may well be able to force a move as and when they wish – great for the players, even better for the wealthier sides who don’t have to jump through so many hoops. With protections for smaller teams reduced, we could see even less money filtering down the footballing pyramid globally. And the amount filtering down was already far too little across the board.
There is almost no question that if the Diarra case changes anything, the teams which benefit the most will be the wealthiest who can exploit it, not least because their own players are less likely to want to force moves away of their own as they’ll already be close to the top of the earnings potential and playing for more prestigious clubs. The only real question is the extent to which the transfer rules end up changing and the degree by which the super-rich can exploit it.
Just look at the transfer dealings undertaken by free-spending sides like Chelsea or Manchester United, the clubs who sign the most players for the most money year in and year out. As it stands, the clubs they want to take players from have tools with which to fight back and at the very least ensure that they get top dollar. If fees started to be decided by a tribunal or the players’ freedom to move positions became considerably easier in some other way, then they those smaller sides may not have access to such a luxury.
In some quarters, Chelsea have been used as an example of how big clubs could be negatively impacted - after all, if players do end up being able to move much more easily, then those eight- and nine-year contracts that they’ve been dishing out suddenly become a lot less valuable. In the short term, certainly, a significant shift in players’ freedoms to break contracts could certainly hurt a club like Chelsea that have invested heavily in a model based on a potentially-defunct transfer system. But in the long run, wealthy teams having the capacity to poach players with ease will disproportionately benefit the sides able to offer the highest wages and meatiest signing bonuses.
Significant changes may also serve to dissuade smaller clubs from investing heavily in youth development. Academies are already high-cost methods of producing players for the first team and the only way a lot of clubs can justify them down the league ladder is by earning money from player sales when youngsters come good. If that income stream is diminished, then many clubs may reduce funding for their academies or close them altogether, as several EFL clubs already have in a turbulent financial climate.
The only thing that’s almost certain is that if the Diarra case gets through the appeals process, then clubs will soon have the ability to buy players out of their contracts without FIFA or national FAs being able to prevent the player from being registered or given international clearance. That can only tilt the scales in the direction of the clubs with the most cash.
Of course, most of us would be appalled by rules which prevented us from, say, leaving a small provincial company to take up a more prestigious job at a major multinational in the same industry. Professional footballers, as well-paid as those at the top of the game may be, should plainly still have the same fundamental employment rights as the rest of us, and it is unsurprising that the traditional rules of the transfer market were not judged to be sacrosanct or more important than EU employment law. But the playing field of sports business is hardly level in the first place, and this may well tilt things even further. We are rapidly reaching a point at which asking smaller clubs to battle their way to the top through shrewd spending and development of their own players is akin to asking a local greengrocer to compete with Tesco.
It may be that little will change, and when it comes time to rewrite the rules FIFA will almost certainly do everything within their power to minimise the changes within the rules they now have to follow - but it a new system does bring in wholesale changes, then it could end up being that the entirely fair and just case brought by Diarra ends up having knock-on effects which damage the competitive balance of the game even more.
