UEFA has invited Europe’s biggest domestic leagues to a meeting after the World Cup this summer to find a common, less intrusive approach to how European football should use video assistant referees (VAR).
And, in a separate move, European football’s governing body is also planning to take a leaf from the Premier League’s book by experimenting with a direct-to-consumer (DTC) streaming platform in a smaller market.
Last month, English football’s top-flight announced its plan to launch a DTC joint venture called Premier League + with its Singaporean broadcast partner StarHub from the start of next season. Elsewhere, Germany’s Bundesliga has launched a “Bundesliga Pass” DTC product in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, while Ligue 1 has already cut out the middleman by going to direct to its fans in France.
UEFA now sells its media rights via UC3, its joint venture with European Football Clubs (EFC), and has already secured long-term deals for its club competitions in the big five European markets — France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK — as well in Japan and the Netherlands.
Earlier this month, UC3 and its marketing agency Relevent Football Partners started a second wave of auctions in the rest of Europe, Canada, Central America, Mexico and South America. Once completed, these deals will start in 2027/28, while the current six-year deal with CBS Sports in the United States runs until 2030.
Like the Bundesliga and Premier League, UC3 is likely to pick a less lucrative market than these for its DTC trial, with Asian countries such as Singapore ideal for this purpose as they offer a proven audience for European football and dependable upload speeds.
The timing of such a move is interesting given Real Madrid’s recent decision to end its near five-year dispute with UEFA over the aborted European Super League. The 15-time European champions were the last of the ESL clubs to give up on the project, having more recently lobbied for a version of the breakaway league that looked a lot like the Champions League, except that it would be televised via a global, DTC streaming platform which included an advertising-funded version that would be free of charge.
There is no suggestion that UEFA is considering something as radical as that but Real Madrid continue to believe that a Netflix-like service for European football will, at some point, unlock huge new revenues for the game’s elite.
That, however, remains a pipe dream. In the meantime, UEFA is determined to persuade the likes of the Premier League, LaLiga and Serie A to adopt a more consistent and light-touch approach to VAR.
The move comes a month after the governing body’s chief refereeing officer Roberto Rosetti told its annual congress in Brussels that VAR was becoming too forensic and strongly suggested that he was opposed to the FIFA-led push to extend its remit to review corners and check second yellow cards.
Those changes were approved by the International Football Association Board (IFAB), the body responsible for the game’s laws, two weeks after Rosetti’s February speech but this week’s round of European club games has provided fresh evidence of UEFA’s desire to keep VAR interventions to a minimum, and to do them as quickly as possible.
Speaking last month, Rosetti said: “At the end of the season we need to speak about this, because we cannot go in this direction of microscopic VAR interventions. We love football like it is.”
Of course, some football fans would like to scrap VAR entirely but that is not Rosetti’s intention at all. His belief, in line with UEFA’s stance, is that having introduced video replays, there is no going back.
He believes that despite the weekly debates about VAR, in every country, the technology has eradicated the worst injustices. He also thinks that the current generation of match officials has grown up with replays, goal-line technology and semi-automatic offside technology, and taking them away now would create chaos.
Uefa has also opted to keep country protection rules in the Champions League as they are after some clubs pushed for changes. A meeting of Uefa’s Club Competitions Committee earlier this year reviewed the system after some clubs wanted country protection extended to cover the last 16, as was previously the case in the tournament, while others suggested it should be scrapped altogether including in the group phase.
The committee took the decision to keep the rules as they are where no team from the same country can play each other in the league phase unless there are too many teams from one country in the same seeding pot.