Athanasios Rantos. The name of this 69-year-old Greek from Athens could be as revolutionary and crucial to European football as Jean-Marc Bosman was in the 1990s. Rantos has been the General Counsel of the Court of Justice of the European Union since September 2020 and this Thursday he must make public his opinion on the Super League case, ruling on whether there is an abuse of power by UEFA and FIFA against the promoters of an alternative competition to the Champions League.
This is the first major assault in the fight that the clubs, led by Real Madrid, FC Barcelona and Juventus, raised the two big federative bodies. The three rebel entities are the only ones that remain firm in their convictions of the 12 founders that existed in April 2021.
The General Counsel’s decision is not binding for the final judgment, but it will mark a line that can be very enlightening. The final resolution is expected in the spring of 2023.
The magistrate expert acts as a kind of adviser on the matter and the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU), a commission of 15 judges who will have the last word, will deliberate on his opinion. Each one of the judges can propose changes in the initial opinion until the sentence is adopted, which will be voted by simple majority. This phase can take between four and six months. According to statistics, in two out of three cases, the Grand Chamber follows and respects the criteria of the General Counsel. Hence the importance of the opinion that Rantos will promulgate today during the morning of today.
In any case, it will not be the Grand Chamber that dictates the sentence, but rather it will send its agreement to the Mercantile Court 17 of Madrid, which is the one who raised the case to Luxembourg.
To avoid sanctions, the three clubs went to the Madrid courts to request precautionary measures. Thus they managed to paralyze the files opened by UEFA. It was the judge of that room, now replaced by a female judge, who raised the case to the European instances about a possible infringement of articles 101 and 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU by wanting to prevent UEFA from other competitions outside its scope. and his coat.
In July, at the seat of the court in Luxembourg, an oral hearing was held with both parties. While in November Bernd Reichart, CEO of the Super League, went to the UEFA headquarters in Nyon for a meeting. There, in addition to Ceferin, the representatives of the leagues, among them Javier Tebas, the president of PSG, Nasser Al-Jelaifi, as president of the ECA and representatives of Bayern, Ajax and the players’ unions were waiting for him to stage that “everything European football opposes the greedy plan. The pulse can start to tilt today.
