As Football Leaks dust settles, a soccer lawlessness emerges

It looks for all the world like the inmates are running the asylum.

A week or so has passed since the latest round of Football Leaks – soccer’s answer to WikiLeaks – revelations emerged through a consortium of European media outlets, led by German magazine Der Spiegel, which published internal emails from UEFA and others. The haze from the explosive claims is lifting and the outlines of the ramifications become clearer. What remains makes for an unsettling picture. An image of lawlessness.

European club soccer, for all intents and purposes, is run by, well, Europe’s soccer clubs. UEFA, the continent’s nominal governing body, appears to be very much a bit-player in this act. It finds itself marginalized by the powerful mega-clubs, who generate the billions in revenue with UEFA subsisting on the scraps left on the table.

Around the start of this decade, UEFA installed something called Financial Fair Play, a sort of financial check on its member soccer clubs. It was intended to do two things. First, to force clubs to live within their means, after UEFA found that more than half of its clubs were losing money. The second was to avoid large cash injections from outside entities that changed the balance of power within the sport overnight – or as long-time Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger called it, “financial doping.”

For a time, it seemed like it was working. Clubs were only allowed to accept limited investments from owners or outside entities, at the peril of fines, squad-size reductions and even expulsion from European competition. Clubs were investigated. Punishment was meted out. And there was, at the very least, an illusion that there were financial parameters everybody had to stay within.

Except, there weren’t.

Football Leaks revealed that Oryx Qatar Sports Investments, which owns Paris Saint-Germain as a kind of international prestige play, had, in fact, sunk some $2 billion into the club since taking over in 2011. It did so, in fact, with the assistance of then-UEFA president Michel Platini and general secretary Gianni Infantino, now the FIFA president. Needless to say, that was many multiples of the allowed investment.

Manchester City, meanwhile, owned by the United Arab Emirates, got some $3 billion over the last seven years from its principals and artificially inflated sponsorship deals.

They were caught. And then UEFA invited them to formulate their punishment, as if a judge was letting a guilty defendant determine his own prison sentence. They both agreed to $67.5 million fines – of which two-thirds was suspended – and a few squad and transfer restrictions, which is less a slap on the wrist than a gentle caress. What’s more, the clubs were able to get out of the sanctions early, while a second PSG investigation was apparently abandoned for no reason.

PSG has denied the reports and City gave as non-committal a no-comment as you can, saying it “will not be providing any comment on out-of-context materials purported to have been hacked or stolen.”

This nevertheless underscores the widely held notion that it’s the clubs that ultimately run UEFA, rather than the other way around. They are the product, after all. And they can get just about anything done by invoking the perpetual threat of breaking away and creating their own version of the Champions League.

It’s worked for years. And most recently, it served as leverage to guarantee four spots in the Champions League for each of the four biggest leagues – England, Spain, Germany and Italy – no matter their performance. That leaves fewer places for other leagues, even if their clubs outperform those from the foursome of legacy circuits.

Speaking of this Super League concept, the Football Leaks disclosure exposed that such a defection was once again in the works recently, with seven of the game’s biggest clubs deep in discussion for months about how it might work. They’d break away and keep all those millions to themselves, stripping the Champions League of its best teams, games, players and likely torpedoing its revenue in the long run.

Another revelation: PSG had a policy of identifying prospects’ race when scouting youth players outside of Paris, which is illegal under French law – not to mention plainly racist. There may have existed a kind of racial quota system in the youth teams, akin to the scandal over race quotas in France’s youth national teams in 2011. At least one major talent, Yann Ghobo, who is now on France’s under-18 national team, was reportedly passed over by PSG on the basis of race.

PSG has acknowledged the practice and say it has already been suspended. The club blames a lone actor, but for a club of that caliber, that’s a questionable explanation.

All these things may not feel related. But between the flagrant disregard for financial rules and bespoke, negotiated punishments, the perpetual threat of defection by the big clubs and the dubious practices at one of soccer’s juggernaut clubs, the conclusion that UEFA has lost control, that there really isn’t anybody overseeing the game at its highest level, becomes credible.

It all feels of a piece. The clubs as the rebellious high school kids and UEFA as the powerless hall monitor, vocal but ultimately toothless.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a Yahoo Sports soccer columnist and a sports communication lecturer at Marist College. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.