UEFA bemoans ‘Bosman’ legacy

THE 10th anniversary of the Bosman ruling, which revolutionised football transfers in Europe, has led UEFA to claim rich clubs are now richer, poorer clubs are poorer and unlawful traffic of young players from abroad has increased.

December 15, 1995 was the date the European Court of Justice ruled that within the European Union, no transfer fee could be asked for a player at the end of his contract and the number of foreign players in a team could not be limited.

European football’s governing body UEFA complained that the ruling had ignored the “specifity of sport” and brought about a host of problems within the professional game, including the illegal traffic of young players from Africa and South America.

The matter started way back in June 1990 when Belgian football club Liege, which had financial difficulties, offered 26-year-old Jean-Marc Bosman a new contract with wages reduced by 75%.

The player refused, and after discussions with Dunkirk, agreed a deal with the French club. However Liege refused to allow Bosman to join them, forcing him into no man’s land.

On August 8, 1990, Bosman sued Liege, claiming both transfer fees at the end of contracts and nationality quotas were illegal.

Up till that point, clubs could ask for a fee when selling a player at the end of their contract but the ruling boosted the bargaining power of players, and particularly their agents, making many of them spectacularly rich.

Only a handful of top clubs could afford the best players, creating a bigger divide between the playing standards of top clubs and the rest in Europe’s major leagues.

UEFA director general Lars-Christen Olsson said this week at a press conference in Brussels: “The Bosman ruling is certainly not the cause of all the problems in football but it took away certain structures that football officials had put in place.”

He added the gap has since been widening between rich clubs and the others while the training of young players has worsened, and the traffic of players from Africa and South America had increased since the ruling.

“UEFA is not going to try to change the ruling, as that would not be worth the trouble, but it is going to try and work with the EU to fight the negative effects of it,” he said.

Olsson said he was happy with last week’s decision that UEFA and the EU would create a working group which would try to find solutions to the problems of football in Europe.

Olsson claimed the “specifity of sport”, mentioned in the 1999 Nice Treaty, had not been recognised by the EU and that football could not be run on purely business terms.

As for Bosman himself, he has been largely forgotten by the footballing community.

“I would have preferred someone else had taken part in all this,” Bosman told Belgian daily newspaper La Derniere Heure/Les Sports recently. “I would have liked, at the time, to have been just a young player on the verge of a good career.

“However I am not bitter, just realistic. I did what I felt I had to do and I’m proud to have followed through on my convictions.”

He told the Derniere Heure newspaper in December 2004: “I contributed to the enrichment of a whole host of players but they did not, in turn, give me much recognition while at the same time claiming they had helped me.”

“An example. Gianluca Vialli was at the end of his contract at Juventus and was able to leave for Chelsea. He made about €300,000 net extra per season and could have said ‘Thank you Jean-Marc’ at some stage.”

Bosman added however that Dutch internationals and some Belgium players had helped him out financially.

And several months ago, Bosman said football had turned its back on him.

“I have been completely excluded from football which profited a great deal from the ruling. And now there is still a tendency to blame me for all the problems in the game,” he said.