Why Real Madrid's Super League "defeat" is a mere blip on the way to the rich getting richer

Football's major governing bodies, not least UEFA, which governs the world's richest leagues, continue to help the biggest, richest clubs in getting richer and more powerful

“Football will win,” said Nasser Al-Khelaifi (below), the chairman of football’s reigning European champions, Paris Saint-Germain, and one of football’s most powerful administrators, as he addressed UEFA’s Congress in Brussels last week.

At the annual powwow of Europe’s great and good, UEFA, Real Madrid and the EFC - formerly the ECA, chaired by Qatar’s Al-Khelaifi - had just signed an agreement, signalling Real Madrid’s retreat from the ill-conceived Super League and the reintegration of the Bernabeu club into the European football family.

It was a curious moment. Real Madrid briefed that they had won. UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, echoed Al-Khelaifi’s words and said that football was the winner. From Florentino Perez to the ubiquitous Gianni Infantino, the “football family” demonstrated more unity than ever.

In a dense statement, the three parties wrote that they had “reached an agreement of principles for the well-being of European club football, respecting the principle of sporting merit with emphasis on long-term club sustainability and the enhancement of fan experience through the use of technology.

“This agreement of principles will also serve to resolve their legal disputes related to the European Super League, once such principles are executed and implemented.”

What did that even mean? Real Madrid’s return was framed as the ultimate collapse of the Super League, but few at the UEFA Congress were willing to shine a light on the finer details of the agreement.

A senior UEFA official indicated to Sporting Intelligence that Real Madrid had gained little. They had become isolated, even if the club’s longstanding boss Florentino Perez had been one of the main drivers of the Super League project.

They have returned to the European establishment in different circumstances. The EFC and the joint venture that the EFC now have with UEFA - which is called UC3 - call the shots in the continental club game.

UEFA’s annual financial report discloses as much, saying: “We also transferred the management, sale and delivery of all media, sponsorship and licensing rights to our elite men’s and women’s club competitions to UC3, a UEFA-EFC joint venture.”

Real Madrid and the other elite clubs can therefore now lobby from the inside for any future reformatting of the Champions League. Sources say that one reformatting proposal is that the current 36-team group phase becomes a “two division” phase, with the “biggest” clubs in one 18-team league, and “the rest” in another 18-team league, with more teams from the “big clubs” pool getting to the last 16 than from the “other” pool.

It should be stressed: this is all up for grabs and proposals remain in their infancy. But the bottom line is that Europe’s “biggest” clubs - Real Madrid, Barcelona, PSG, and the major clubs from the Premier League, Bundesliga, and Serie A will have enhanced chances of success, and crucially, enhanced chances of making more money, under any reformatted version of the CL.

The EFC currently takes €25m from UEFA annually, as first reported by The Independent. Those funds, it is understood, come from UEFA club competitions. On page 29, UEFA’s 2024-25 financial report discloses: “€25m was allocated to European Football Clubs (EFC) in accordance with the memorandum of understanding signed by UEFA and EFC.”

In total, over the course of multiple seasons, an estimated €96m has flown from UEFA to the EFC. With this cash going to the EFC rather than to clubs who might (should) have earned it via European competition, it means lots of clubs have lost out on income.

Aston Villa (€631,000) and Celtic (€1.2m) are among dozens and dozens of clubs to miss out on extra revenue because of the money going to the EFC from UEFA. In the 2024-25 season, Scotland’s Heart of Midlothian missed out on €43,000 through their participation in the Conference League while Arsenal, the losing semi-finalists in the Champions League, lost out on €883,000.

A full list of how much each club across has “lost” because of UEFA’s funding of the EFC is available in a downloadable spreadsheet below. The remainder of this piece, and accompanying documents, is available to paying subscribers, without whom this site would not exist.