Real Madrid, named in May as the world’s richest football club by Forbes (for the fourth year in a row), could become a whole lot richer as the latest episode in the Super League saga starts to play out.
Last week UEFA lost an appeal at a provincial court in Madrid, with the court upholding a ruling by Madrid’s commercial court that, by vetoing plans for the breakaway Super League four years ago, UEFA abused its dominant competitive position.
Taking on the world’s richest football club in a legal dispute, and losing, can have major ramifications. Bean counters at Real Madrid are claiming the club has lost out on revenues of between €4.5 and €4.7bn, with the missing revenue coming from commercial, broadcast and matchday income. It has been reported that the club is now planning to file a claim for damages of more than €4bn against UEFA.
The plans for the Super League were revealed in 2021. The League, proposed to be made up of 20 teams, with 15 having a permanent place, was roundly denounced by football fans and politicians alike, and collapsed within 72 hours of being launched as major football clubs saw the light and backtracked on the initiative.
At the time UEFA and Fifa blocked the breakaway league’s formation, and the two organisations were subsequently judged to have abused a dominant position and acted in an uncompetitive manner. A ruling in December 2023 by the European Court of Justice enhanced Real Madrid’s claim by stating that UEFA ‘sprevious regulations around the creation of new club competitions had violated EU law. Real Madrid claims that the recent court ruling confirmed that UEFA “seriously breached” EU competition law, paving the way for a substantial claim “to compensate for the damages suffered by the club”.
From its side, UEFA has come out fighting, claiming that the court ruling “does not validate the abandoned ‘super league’ project announced in 2021” or “undermine” the new rules it has since adopted for authorising new competitions.
As always, there are a myriad of appeal routes available to UEFA and Real Madrid, and the legal battle will inevitably run on for years. What the case does reinforce is how intrinsically linked the business of sport is to finance and the law, and the immense amount of money involved in football. To put it into context, the €4 billion damages claim is roughly the same as the annual GDP of Liberia, the west African country with a population of 5.5 million people.
Forbes values Real Madrid at $6.75 billion, and the club is now generating more than $1 billion annually, the first football club to achieve that benchmark. In anyone’s book, that makes the club a major global business, and as such it will put financial considerations ahead of fans’ desires. This inevitably means that, while the ‘Super League’ itself is dead and buried, the concept remains very much alive. A22, the group behind the Super League, announced last December a new proposed format for European Football Competition, the so-called ‘Unify League’ which aims to be “the most exciting football competition in the world”.
So long as football remains as popular as it is, there will be businesspeople attempting to extract as much money from the sport as possible, and new formats for competitions will keep being proposed. These proposed new competitions will vary in terms of format and attributes – the one guarantee is that any new proposal will be more lucrative for the clubs involved than the status quo, and for that simple reason they will keep coming out of the woodwork.
David Little is a Partner at Bishop & Sewell in our expert Sports Law and Corporate & Commercial
If you would like to contact him, please call on either 07968 027343 or 020 7631 4141 or email: company@
The above is accurate as at 29 October 2025.
The information above may be subject to change. The content of this note should not be considered legal advice, and each matter should be considered on a case-by-case basis.
