Drogheda debacle has many fathers, but Uefa are more culpable than all

The 42

6 days ago

DROGHEDA UNITED' EXCLUSION from Europe is a dispiriting fact not because they didn't play by the rules, but because they did not follow a Uefa-designed loophole at Uefa's behest.
It's easy to lose a grip on the story amid its blizzard of finicky detail, so stick with us for a moment.
Drogs are part of a multi-club organisation owned by an American investment fund named the Trivela Group, who first moved into football with a purchase of English club Wallsall in 2022. They acquired Drogheda in February last year, and added Danish club Silkeborg to the portfolio in December last year. They also control a club in Togo.
Uefa don't allow clubs controlled by the same ownership group to compete in the same competition, citing integrity concerns, and so we could sound the Danger Here klaxon when Silkeborg joined Drogheda in the Conference League qualifiers at the start of June.
To ensure both of their clubs could compete, Trivela needed to follow precedent in transferring its ownership of one of the clubs to a blind trust, which would reassure Uefa they would not be dictating sporting matters at both clubs at the same time.
This precedent was set last year, when the owners of Man City and Man United were allowed to transfer Girona and Nice respectively into a blind trust, to allow all four clubs compete in their Uefa competitions. They were allowed to do this in June last year, whereas this year Uefa brought the deadline forward to 1 March.
Trivela missed the March deadline, and so went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport to argue they should be given dispensation to do the blind trust business this week, in advance of the draw. CAS ruled that Trivela ought to have known the deadline, as it had been properly communicated by Uefa in October last year.
Given Drogheda finished lower in their league than Silkeborg, it is they who miss out, and the bigger Danish club are allowed to compete.
The story is chiefly a travesty for Kevin Doherty and his players, many of whom will have made career decisions around the expectation that Drogheda would be competing in Europe.
The club, meanwhile, have lost out on at least €500,000 in prize money and the league as a whole will now have one club fewer fighting for co-efficient ranking points.
(The damage will be somewhat limited by the fact the co-efficient total will be divided by the three competing clubs, rather than four, as was to be the case if Drogheda had been competing.)
And, as ever, the fans are probably the biggest losers of all, who have had their European trip taken away from them.
If you want to play the blame game, then it's a target rich environment.
The FAI insist they flagged concerns with Trivela last November, and while they might have done more to repeat these concerns and urge rival clubs to apply for a European licence in case Drogheda missed out, to turn this into another FAI screw-up story is OTT.
Rules cannot be enforced without the principle that those involved have a responsibility to know all of those rules, and if the League of Ireland wants to be taken more seriously, the errors of clubs cannot automatically be pinned on the FAI, just as the Association can't take all the credit for clubs' many recent achievements.
No, this is an almighty balls-up by the Trivela Group. They had one club in Europe and bought another presumably with the ambition to qualify for Europe, so they should have known the rules and acted to comply.
But take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
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The blind trust business is a legal means of satisfying the obvious sporting integrity issues thrown up by multi-club ownership. These concerns were established ahead of the 1998/99, when two Joe Lewis' owned clubs, Slavia Prague and AEK Athens, qualified for the Uefa Cup. Uefa and then CAS barred the lower-ranked AEK, given the possibility for a conflict of interest were they paired together.
CAS pointed to one hypothetical: what if both sides were paired together in a group phase and were incentivised to draw their game? In that instance, the owner would have the power to award the players a bigger bonus for drawing the game than winning.
But having acknowledged the many potential issues with multi-club ownership, Uefa did not outlaw it. Instead they found a regulatory means of making it acceptable. The proximity of relationship between Red Bull clubs Leipzig and Salzburg was summed up in 2016 when a Salzburg defender, Andreas Ulmer, accidentally wore a Leipzig shirt during the second half of a Champions League qualification match against FK Liepaja.
Uefa initially banned Leipzig when both qualified for the Champions League in 2017, but both clubs were allowed to compete on appeal, once the clubs agreed to limit player trading and Salzburg fiddled about with a few bits and pieces – including their branding and board composition – to the point they could satisfy Uefa that Red Bull were merely sponsors, rather than owners.
Multi-club ownership then exploded: a 2022 Uefa report said it had risen by more than 400% across Europe in the space of a decade.
Uefa are now trying to sift through the wreckage sprung forth from Pandora's Box.
The latest workaround has been the blind trust, piloted by the owners of City and United last year. Both clubs' owners transferred their shares in their secondary clubs, Girona and Nice, to an independent trustee who is overseen by Uefa, while promising not to trade players or share coaching or scouting intel. (City were still allowed to sign Girona star Savinho, who had been on loan the previous season from French club Troyes, whom the City Football Group also own.)
Uefa demand that nobody in a multi-club network is in a position to influence the sporting decisions made at more than one club at any one time. That said, the blind trust is a temporary thing, and both Girona and Nice will revert to their old ownership structure on 1 July.
So while owners can't in theory exercise control over sporting decisions at two clubs during the season, they are free to do so in advance of that season.
While the blind trust complies with Uefa's rules the optics offer a different impression entirely. Evangelos Marinakis, for instance, put his Nottingham Forest shares into a blind trust earlier this year, in order to avoid a potential European conflict with another of his clubs, Olympiakos.
He remained a very visible presence during the season run-in, however, infamously storming onto the pitch at the City Ground in May. (Gary Neville, heavily critical of Marinakis' intervention, found himself banned from Forest's stadium for the season's final game.)
But Marinakis has satisfied Uefa's rules.
Drogheda's owners must take responsibility for their feckless, costly error, though they made one with regard to a rule which ultimately legitimises multi-club ownership.
Such is its prevalence now, Uefa can only mitigate against its impacts: it's another malign trend in the sport that moved fast to break things and become too unwieldy to rein in. It is, after all, an easy solution to the original sin of professional football: vast financial inequity.
Uefa did initially ban the Red Bull clubs, but their workaround was heavily influenced by the EU's principle of free movement of people, goods, and services. Block a club from the Champions League and a club may successfully argue that Uefa are violating that principle. And were Uefa to lose that, they could lose their right to organise all of European football.
This is what the vestigial Super League clubs have argued, with Uefa fighting back by arguing that sport has a special status enshrined within the EU's founding treaty, one that would render moot these anti-competitive arguments.
Uefa, though, have been much too slow in finding their voice on this special status, and have been guilty of a terrible paralysis in the face of multi-club owners. Hence they are reduced to enforcing rules like that under which Drogheda have been condemned.
It has been a brutal defeat for Drogheda United, but the game as a whole is suffering more than anyone wishes to acknowledge.
This is a sport full of rules but missing proper governance and, above all, leadership.