The Bosman Decision; or, How the EU Changed Football

When I began doing research on the EU-ization of football, one year stood out as the point when the EU changed the way football worked: 1995. It was in this year that the way European football clubs manage players and transfers changed dramatically as the result of EU policy and the first time EU policy was really brought into the footballing world.

There is no long history of Belgium contributing much to the world of international football. Never has the small country hoisted the World Cup, or even the European Cup for that matter. They didn’t even qualify this year, and probably won’t qualify for 2010’s World Cup. In addition to an under-performing national side, their clubs never do well against those of other nations. Their best club, Anderlecht, has a budget totaling about a hundredth of the major English teams like Manchester United and Arsenal. The saddest part of that is the fact that Anderlecht’s budget is more than 100 times that of many other Belgian teams. There isn’t even storied fan past like in Britain, Spain, or even The Netherlands. There also aren’t any spectacular players to come out of the small multilingual country.

So it is interesting that the biggest change in the way football management works came out of Belgium.

Before the 1995 European Court of Justice’s Bosman ruling (what shook all of this up), European football, like football in most other parts of the world, worked under a “transfer system.” The transfer system worked like this: When a player’s contract expired he was not free to change clubs until a new club paid his current club a transfer fee. This fee was designed to compensate teams for training and development of the player. Also, it was a way for teams to increase revenue and to maintain control over where a player went when he was done playing.

In 1990 Belgian footballer Jean Marc Bosman tried to move from his team in the Belgian Juplier League (the Belgians, of course, would have a league sponsored by beer) to Dunkerque, a team in France. His contract with RFC Leige, his Belgian club, had run out, but Dunkerque had not offered the Belgian club enough of a transfer fee, so RFC Leige retained Bosman, refusing to field him and cutting his wages to 500 pounds a month.

During the next five years, Bosman took his case through the legal channels all the way to the European Court of Justice. During this time Bosman could not find a job at any permier European club, and settled instead for playing . Most European clubs came out against Bosman's case, saying it would disrupt competition and hurt the sport.

Steffan Kesenne, a sports economist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium who worked with Bosman's lawyers on the case and the impact a ruling in favor would have on the competitive balance of clubs, said that clubs were probably afraid of losing a substantial degree of control over players.

Which is exactly what happened in 1995 when the Court ruled in favor of Bosman, saying that two separate factors of the European transfer system - at least insofar as it pertained to relations between EU countries and clubs - were against the bylaws of the European constitutions.

First, the Court ruled that a club could not charge a transfer fee when a player’s contract had expired. European citizens are entitled to a freedom of contract, and when their contracts have expired, they are entitled to seek new employment independent of their previous employer, just like in every other profession.

Second, it ruled that, like other European Union citizens, players had the right of free movement between different countries’ leagues. EU citizens are allowed to move between countries seeking employment, and firms may not discriminate against any EU citizen on the basis of nationality.

In the process of creating a single market within the EU, the supergovernmental body tried to ensure that inputs could travel across borders as outputs and currency. Football thought it was outside these bounds for many years, and was surprised to learn that it had to comply by the same rules as other industries.

With the transfer system eliminated, players are free to move between countries and leagues at will when their contract expires, becoming free agents like American athletes. Clubs can still charge fees for players whose contracts have not expired.

As a result of the ruling, teams began signing players for longer contracts, and players began to make substantially more money.

UEFA, who comprises 53 different leagues, now has some leagues inside the EU who must abide by the non-transfer system rules, and some outside the EU-area, which still work under the transfer system.

Since 1995, the EU has done a lot of research and reporting about how to best tackle sport – and football – but none of their efforts have had the kind of impact that Bosman, and the similar decisions the followed in Bosman’s wake, had on the sport.