Elite clubs vs small and medium clubs: the clash between ECA and UEC heats up | OneFootball

Jacopo Carmassi is Principal Financial Stability Expert at the European Central Bank. All views expressed are exclusively those of the author and do not implicate in any way the European Central Bank nor any other entity to which the author is affiliated.

Correspondent from Brussels – Where are ECA and UEFA? This was the question asked by Spanish LaLiga President, Javier Tebas, in his closing remarks at the second edition of the European Professional Football Forum organized yesterday in Brussels by the Union of European Clubs (UEC). Together with representatives of 120 Clubs, key figures of several relevant bodies, including among others the European Commission and European Leagues, the association of European professional football leagues, attended the event – but ECA (the European Club Association) and UEFA were absent, despite having been invited. These absences are striking, but not entirely unexpected in light of the tensions between ECA and UEC: in fact, these tensions have now become an open conflict. But let’s take one step back, to understand what happened and why this has crucial implications for the future of football in Europe.

As previously reported on these columns, the ECA and the UEC have engaged in a tight race to conquer members. The ECA is the European Club Association, counting over 700 members from 55 countries and including the biggest Clubs. As first step, the ECA has widened its membership, moving from 247 member Clubs in April 2021 (the beginning of the Presidency of Nasser Al-Khelaïfi) to 717 Clubs as of today. They did so particularly via the members of the ECA network – Clubs without voting rights but with the possibility to benefit from several ECA services and from their participation to the network. As a second step, the ECA adopted this year an internal reform changing its membership rules: this reform has automatically transformed the members of the ECA network into associated members – under a new philosophy labelled as “Membership for All”.

Associated members have more rights and functions than network members (which do not exist any longer), but they lack full voting rights, unlike ordinary members. Meanwhile, the UEC, officially launched in April 2023 with the goal of offering representation to small and medium European Clubs, managed to gather over 140 members from 25 countries, and to elect a President and an Executive Board in April 2024.  All Clubs which are members of the UEC have full voting rights and there is no membership tiering.

The UEC and the ‘One Club, One Vote’ system

Ever since its inception, the UEC has emphasized the “one Club, one vote” principle, which is also enshrined in the UEC statutes. After the strong criticism to the previous ECA membership tiering, with only ordinary members having full voting rights, the UEC has not changed its stance after the recent ECA internal reform: the UEC continues to argue that associated members remain excluded from decision-making processes, because they still do not have full voting rights. The UEC goes on to claim that the ECA continues to only represent the interests of the big Clubs, without offering adequate representation to the other Clubs. The UEC tries to cover exactly that ground – those Clubs that the UEC considers not to be properly represented, and which are typically small and medium Clubs, not only of first divisions but also of other divisions.

Clearly, the ECA has a totally different view: it regards itself as an association representing all Clubs, not only the biggest Clubs, but also the small and medium ones, and considers other associations as “protest groups”. Exactly because it sees itself as representing all Clubs – and to be precise, the only association representing Clubs in Europe – the ECA does not recognise other Club associations (specifically, the UEC) and calls all relevant stakeholders to do the same.