In the frenzy of the reactions generated by the announcement on Sunday evening of the Super League, the prospect of the exclusion of the three clubs concerned by this project and still in contention in the Champions League - Manchester City, opponent of PSG, as well as Chelsea and Real Madrid - is undoubtedly the one that most appealed to the fans of the club in the capital.
Monday evening, the site of the German daily Bild even evoked two equally delusional scenarios: declaring the PSG winner of the competition or replacing the three undesirable by their opponents - not rebels - of the quarter-finals, Bayern, Porto and Dortmund.
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This prospect was based on the words of Jesper Moller, president of the Danish federation and member of the UEFA Executive Committee, who said on Monday: “These clubs have to leave, and I expect that to happen on Friday, and then we will see how we end the Champions League ”.
The jurists calmed the ardor of the most virulent
In the evening, Florentino Perez, the president of Real Madrid but also of the Super League, had swept away these threats on Spanish TV: “I do not want to detail the legal reasons, but that will not happen, it is impossible. No one is going to exclude Real Madrid from the Champions League, nor Manchester City. It is true that if this idea may have crossed the minds of some UEFA leaders, its lawyers quickly had to calm their enthusiasm. As Antoine Duval, a specialist in European sports law at the Asser Institute in The Hague, underlines, and quoted by AFP, such an exclusion “would expose UEFA to actions for damages by the channels holding the TV rights. ".
This did not prevent, this Tuesday, the German Federation (DFB) to ask that the twelve founding clubs of the Super League be excluded from all the competitions to come "until they think again of their many supporters , which made them the giants of world football, and not only in their wallets ”.
"Either you are inside or you are outside", for his part, launched the president of Fifa Gianni Infantino on the sidelines of the UEFA congress in Montreux without however putting forward concrete measures.
UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin the day after an unequivocal statement - "Those who play in the Super League will be banned from the World Cup and Euro" - meanwhile left the door open on Tuesday for a reconciliation by assuring the owners of the clubs concerned that there was “still time to change their mind”.
Punishments must be "proportionate"
In any case, the possible legal battles to deprive players of the next Euro, in particular, would be technically difficult to carry out for the football authorities. Admittedly, Fifa and UEFA have regulatory power which allows them to regulate the conditions of access to their competitions. But jurists agree that the sanctions taken should be perceived as "proportionate". In December 2020, the Court of Justice of the European Union thus deemed "disproportionate" the decision of the International Skating Union to deprive in particular of the Olympic Games Dutch speed skaters ready to compete in a private competition. Depriving players of the Euro thus seems complicated if not impossible.
In the meantime, as of Tuesday, a Madrid court ordered in summary proceedings FIFA and UEFA to "refrain from adopting any measure or action or issuing any statement or statement that prevents or poses difficulties, form direct or indirect, in the preparation of the Super League ”. The battle has only just begun, however.