“All Hell Broke Loose”: The Bosman Ruling

In 1995, a landmark European ruling in favour of Jean-Marc Bosman changed the business of football forever. Belgian journalist Samindra Kunti writes about the lasting implications of the case for the sport, and for the player who took on UEFA, his national federation, and his club.

September 2020

On reflection, Sir Alex Ferguson did not overstate the lasting importance of the so-called Bosman ruling, rendered by the European Courts in Luxembourg in December 1995. He said: "Once the European Court of Justice ruled that clubs no longer had to pay transfer fees after the expiration of a player's contract, all hell broke loose. Suddenly it was a free-for-all.”

The Bosman case challenged the lawfulness of the transfer system in European football, which prevented footballers from selling their labour freely to the highest bidder once their contract expired. Football maintained and ossified the questionable practice of tying players to clubs, the industry acting as a tight cartel which resisted any change. The governing bodies FIFA and UEFA wielded remarkable power (as they continue to do) and carried a sense of imperviousness based on a presumption that their global influence and Swiss base rendered them immune from stringent legal control.

Yet even for those institutions, total immunity was fanciful; the American FBI demonstrated as much at the Baur Au Lac hotel as the FIFA corruption case unfolded in 2015, raiding the federation’s preferred Zurich locale and arresting multiple top officials. And it was through Jean-Marc Bosman, born in 1964 in the Belgian city of Liège, that football’s supposed impunity crumbled in the 1990s. On the face of it, Bosman was right: under article 48 of the Treaty of Rome of 25 March 1957, which declared the free movement of workers, he had the right to enter the marketplace and agree a contract with a new employer. Yet his legal challenge was entangled with fiendish complications, questions of jurisdiction, choice of law and recognition of judgements.

Bosman was not the first player to rebel against an outdated transfer system. In the 1960s the contract of England international George Eastham expired, but under the antiquated transfer system his club Newcastle United were free to retain him without pay until he signed a new deal. Eastham, who went on to play for Arsenal and Stoke City, sued his former employers all the way to the High Court in London, where judge Richard Wilberforce marginally improved the position of players: they were now to be guaranteed a new contract on the same terms. A player who wanted to leave, however, still faced the obstacle of a transfer fee, and the European transfer market would not change for decades. 

In the 1980s, Bosman was the captain of Belgium’s under-21 side, but his career stalled at Royal Football Club de Liège. At the end of his contract there in 1990, Bosman wanted to force a transfer to French club Dunkirk. RFC Liège offered him only modest terms to renew his contract, so Bosman decided to move on. The Belgian club, entitled to a transfer fee according to the prevailing regulations at the time, pushed the asking price until Dunkirk rescinded their offer.

Bosman was cornered. He sued RFC Liège and won, but appeals and interventions by his club, the KBVB (Belgian FA), and UEFA took the case to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). What should have taken a matter of weeks, according to Bosman’s lawyer Jean-Louis Dupont, turned into a process of months and years. The player and his lawyers were alienated and then marginalised by the football industry.

If Article 48 enabled the freedom of movement of workers, Bosman argued that football clubs should be prohibited from demanding and receiving payment upon the engagement by a new club of a player who has come to the end of his contract. The Belgian transfer system was among the most restrictive on the continent and the ECJ responded affirmatively, siding with the player.

Bosman’s legal odyssey, a five-year procession of court battles, had come to an end, and two longstanding tenets of European football changed profoundly as a result. The verdict introduced American-style free agency, and also struck down UEFA’s limitation of the number of foreigners at a club. The lack of free agency and the restrictions on foreign players were not compatible with European workers’ constitutional freedom of employment.

Football had difficulties in processing the ECJ’s meddling. On publication of his opinion in September 1995, Advocate General Carl Otto Lenz was the target of a torrent of abuse from the football industry for his alleged failure to understand how the game works. “We have no lessons to learn from somebody who, in a manner of speaking, doesn’t even know that a football is round” sneered Wouter Meulemans, the vice president of the KBVB.

Meulemans was in the wrong. Lenz understood the game but misinterpreted the far-reaching consequences of the ruling for the sport. The ECJ accepted that “the aims of maintaining a balance between clubs by preserving a certain degree of equality and uncertainty as to results and of encouraging the recruitment and training of young players must be accepted as legitimate.” 

The football industry had to comply with the transfer system. In other words, the proportionality test had to be passed: football needed to demonstrate that the transfer system had apt means of achieving its objectives. Lenz suggested that a collective wage cap or the fair distribution among clubs of gate receipts and TV rights — means to prevent rich clubs becoming ever richer and poor clubs ever poorer — could be justified. After all, imbalance was a reason in the general interest to warrant the imposition of restrictions on free competition. 

Lenz and the ECJ envisaged the enforcement of a reorganisation of the football industry with a system of wealth distribution between European clubs as a result of the Bosman ruling. They were wrong. European football did not simply prosper but exploded as the balance of power shifted towards players, who were now empowered to dictate terms and negotiate for wage packets that a rival club was not prepared to offer. Dutch duo Edgar Davids and Patrick Kluivert, who both moved from Ajax to AC Milan, and Steve McManaman, who left Liverpool FC for Real Madrid, were among the high-profile players to benefit from the Bosman ruling. 

It was to be the foundation of the modern game. The judgment also outlawed the quota on foreign players in competitions. In 1999, Manchester United fulfilled Ferguson’s long-standing dream of a European Cup triumph and won a historic “treble” (UEFA Champions League, Premier League, FA Cup) with eight players who previously would have been subject to restrictions on foreign players. 

The Champions League, the brainchild of then UEFA president Lennart Johansson and his general secretary, flourished as a result of the ruling, so much so that it soon became the world’s premier club competition — a season-long parade of the best players from around the globe, drawn to the old continent by astronomical wages and millions in prize money. The UEFA Champions League was now the zenith of the club game, and perhaps of the global game, always in competition with the quadrennial high mass of the sport, the FIFA World Cup. The best players vied for supremacy, not at the World Cup, but in the Champions League, a stage watched and appreciated by millions despite its predictability. The pull of the competition became irresistible; the Copa Libertadores and other continental club competitions were quickly left behind by a modernised edition of the European Cup.

Local businessmen were priced out of the game, no longer able to bankroll the operations of clubs that had been rooted in their communities. Millionaires were replaced by billionaires as Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich became the instigator of the age of the super club. The inequality gap that Lenz and the ECJ had sought to prevent was quickly materialising; the gap between the haves and the have-nots widening rapidly.

By 2001, England defender Sol Campbell commanded wages of £100,000 per week in moving from Tottenham Hotspur to bitter rivals Arsenal on a free transfer: this represented a tenfold increase in wages in the space of just seven years in European football. Football had become the ultimate money tree. So-called super-agents, the likes of Jorge Mendes and Carmine “Mino” Raiola, capitalised on their influential position as middlemen in the game. Everyone seemed to benefit, except for Bosman. 

He played on for obscure French second division clubs and even made a detour to a club on Réunion in the Indian Ocean, but he failed to resurrect his career. Bosman received a compensation package of £312,000 in 1998, but he became bitter and depressed, started drinking, and was convicted for domestic violence. Now in his fifties, Bosman — the grandson of Slovenian mineworkers who survived Nazi labour camps — has mostly lived on welfare benefits. He has repeatedly said that he is still waiting for a “thank you” from the Ronaldos and Beckhams of this world, for his endeavours which altered football forever. Indeed, Bosman never benefited from the “free-for-all.”

Samindra Kunti is a Belgian football journalist and regular contributor to World Soccer.

Words: Samindra Kunti | Imagery: Imago