Summary: Daniel Geey of the Competition and EU Regulatory Law Group at Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP joins up again with Anto to talk through some of the regulatory issues facing third party ownership of players with an eye towards compliance with Financial Fair Play, while taking into account new energy around standardizing the rules from a recent initiative championed by Michel Platini, UEFA and its Professional Football Strategy Council. At the core of this episode is framing the debate between establishing a level set of rules across all of the European leagues while ensuring that smaller leagues and less powerful clubs can find sustainability and strike a competitive balance where not all leagues in the football world are equal. Both FIFA and UEFA have both issued strong statements against the practice of third party interests holding rights to players as there now appears to be a battle brewing between standardization in practice and application versus those clubs and interests who consider third party ownership a valuable economic tool to level the playing field. The questions and concerns posted here is whether prohibition is the answer as found in England and France today or whether balanced measures with new layers of accountability and transparency are the answer as both agents and leagues in countries such as Portugal, Spain, Holland and Belgium do use this strategy much like South American teams do today, while Italy uses another form of co-ownership between football clubs that may prove even more effective as tool given that it is the clubs themselves who negotiate the terms. We examine recent statements by UEFA President, Michel Platini, Portuguese super-agent Jorge Mendes and Rob Jansen, the chairman of the European Football Agents Association, to evaluate where the future for third party ownership might actually reside, and open the discussion into club-sponsored academies around the world which may themselves be hedge funds in another disguise. In the end, the episode gets into the many questions out there about the practice of third party, whether some form of this strategy does make sense in a Financial Fair Play world and if prohibition does appear to the only path forward.
