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On 1 May 2015, FIFA introduced Article 18ter in the FIFA Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players, thereby banning third-party ownership of players' economic rights (TPO) in football. The decision to put a definitive end to the use of TPO in football is highly controversial, especially in countries where TPO is a mainstream financing mechanism for clubs such as Spain, Portugal and countries in South America. In fact, the Portuguese and Spanish football leagues launched a complaint in front of the European Commission, asking it to find the FIFA ban contrary to EU competition law. In order to debate the appropriateness of the TPO debate, the editors of the ASSER International Sports Law Blog organized its first Blog Symposium in April 2015. We received contributions from the complainant (the Spanish football league, LFP) and four renowned experts on TPO matters (Daniel Geey, Ariel Reck, Rafaelle Poli and Christian Duve). The contributions focused on different aspects of the functioning of TPO and on the impact and consequences of the ban.

This article analyzes the decisions involving State aid granted to professional football clubs in financial difficulty, namely Willem II, MVV Maastricht, NEC Nijmegen, FC Den Bosch and Valencia CF. The decisions are fundamentally different in one very important aspect: the aid granted to the Dutch clubs was declared compatible aid, whereas the aid granted to Valencia CF was declared incompatible and needs to be recovered. This article will explain why there were divergences in the decisions and will describe the broader lessons that are to be learned, particularly in order to avoid future recovery decisions.

In 1995, the Bosman ruling granted professional football players the same free movement rights as regular workers. More than 20 years later, the question whether these rights are truly enjoyed still provides for never ending legal and academic debates. An important issue concerns the fact that professional football players are considered workers under national law in most EU Member States, but in some States they are deemed to be self-employed. The choice of one labour status over another has meaningful consequences in terms of social security rights, tax duties, collective labour representation, or more broadly, contractual rights. Such discrepancies at national level lead to two fundamental EU law questions that we aim to address in the present article: Are professional football players subject to the secondary EU legislation applicable to workers when they are in a bogus self-employment relationship: And, can the qualification of football players as self-employed be deemed a restriction on their free movement rights?

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