Inter-club litigation in European football, a comparative legal and historical analysis

Prepared 26 June 2026

  Sources: Premier League PLJP 2023/3 | FIGC | RFEF | DFB/DFL | FFF/DNCG | LPFP | UK Supreme Court | theesk.org  

Summary

This report examines, across the major professional football leagues of Europe, every identifiable instance in which a club has sued, or had a credible legal basis to sue, a fellow competing club for loss of earnings, loss of competitive opportunity, or ‘loss of chance’ arising from that rival’s wrongdoing. 

It builds on, and contextualises against, two known English precedents: the Sheffield United v West Ham ‘Carlos Tevez’ settlement (2007–2009) and the Burnley v Everton compensation award (PLJP 2023/3, 2 June 2026), (subject to appeal) the first successful inter-club damages claim under the Premier League’s financial rules.

The central finding is that England is a genuine structural outlier. 

No equivalent mechanism to Premier League Rule W.51.5, an express contractual power for a disciplinary commission to order one member club to pay unlimited compensation to another, exists in the rulebooks of Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Portugal, Belgium or the Netherlands. 

Where major scandals have occurred in those jurisdictions (Calciopoli in Italy, the Hoyzer affair in Germany, the Apito Dourado scandal in Portugal, Operation Clean Hands in Belgium), the legal consequences have flowed either as sanctions against the wrongdoing club, or as compensation paid by the governing body itself, or as claims against the federation for a flawed regulatory decision, never as a successful damages claim by one club against a rival.

The Burnley v Everton mechanism is not a European norm quietly replicated elsewhere, it is a genuine English peculiarity, made possible by the contractual/arbitral foundation of English sports governance and by the English common-law doctrine of loss of chance (Allied Maples Group v Simmons & Simmons [1995]). No civil-law jurisdiction examined in this report offers a comparable route for one club to recover damages directly from a rival.

Italy (Serie A): Calciopoli, Plusvalenze, and the wall of Giustizia Sportiva

Calciopoli (2006)

The scandal centred on the manipulation of refereeing assignments, exposed through wiretapped conversations involving Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi and football officials. The clubs implicated were Juventus, AC Milan, Fiorentina, Lazio and Reggina (with Arezzo also named). On final appeal (26 October 2006): Juventus were stripped of the 2004/05 and 2005/06 Scudetti and relegated to Serie B with a nine-point deduction; Fiorentina were docked fifteen points; Lazio three points; and Milan retained an eight-point deduction. The vacated 2005/06 title was awarded to Inter Milan. AC Milan nonetheless qualified for, and won, the 2006/07 UEFA Champions League.

The direction of Italian litigation following Calciopoli was the reverse of the English model. It was Juventus, the sanctioned club, that pursued damages, not a club that had been competitively disadvantaged by the manipulation.

The Naples criminal trial (concluded 8 November 2011) expressly excluded all claims for civil damages against Juventus, the court holding the club was not objectively or civilly liable for the conduct of its officials in this context. Juventus then filed a claim before the Tribunale Amministrativo Regionale against the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) and Inter Milan in November 2011, seeking approximately €444 million; this was updated before the Council of State in October 2016 to approximately €581 million. On 13 December 2018, the Court of Cassation rejected the claim outright, applying the ‘principle of autonomy of the national sports system.’

Separately, the Court of Appeal considered and rejected claims for damages brought against Juventus by Atalanta, Bologna, Brescia, Lecce and the financial company Victoria 2000, clubs and entities that had argued they suffered direct harm from the manipulated 2004/05 season. The court found that no specific match in that season had in fact been altered by the non-footballing episodes at issue, and accordingly no direct damage to those parties was established.

No Italian club has ever recovered, or come close to recovering, damages from a rival club arising out of Calciopoli, either as claimant (the disadvantaged clubs failed) or as the consequence of the sanctioned club’s own action (Juventus’s claim against the federation and Inter also failed).

Vincolo di Giustizia

Article 30(2) of the FIGC Statute, enforced through Article 34 of the Codice di Giustizia Sportiva (CGS), binds every affiliated club to accept ‘the full and definitive effectiveness of any measure adopted by FIGC/FIFA/UEFA’ in technical, disciplinary and economic disputes, and to resolve such matters exclusively through the internal sporting justice system rather than the ordinary civil courts. 

Recourse to ordinary courts in matters reserved to sporting justice itself constitutes a disciplinary infraction; even an arbitration clause that purports to derogate from the sporting forum has been sanctioned by the Federal Court of Appeal (CFA, Sezioni Unite, decision no. 57 of the 2022/23 season). Civil damages remain reachable only incidenter tantum before the administrative judge, and then only as compensation for harm caused by an unlawful disciplinary sanction, meaning any viable claim runs against the federation, never directly against a rival club.

Plusvalenze (capital gains) scandal (2021–2023)

Juventus were docked 15 points in January 2023 over false accounting connected to inflated player valuations used to manufacture capital gains (‘plusvalenze’). The points were initially restored on appeal in April 2023, before the Federal Court of Appeal imposed a fresh 10-point deduction in May 2023, dropping Juventus from second to seventh in the table and out of the Champions League qualification places, with AC Milan moving into fourth. Juventus separately accepted a €20 million UEFA fine and a one-year UEFA competition ban as part of a settlement.

Despite the points deduction directly altering Champions League qualification, precisely the kind of fact pattern that gave rise to the Burnley v Everton claim in England, no rival club brought, or is recorded as having seriously threatened, a civil damages claim against Juventus over the Plusvalenze sanctions. This is consistent with, and further confirms, the structural barrier described above.

Spain (LaLiga): Financial control without inter-club damages

LaLiga operates an ex ante squad-cost-limit system (Límite de Coste de Plantilla Deportiva), individualised club by club, rather than a single league-wide cap. The RFEF’s Código Disciplinario provides only for sanctions of a public-law character, stadium closures, points deductions, relegation, and fines. It contains no power, equivalent to Premier League Rule W.51.5, to award compensation from one club to another. The disciplinary route runs from the Comité de Competición, to the Comité de Apelación, and ultimately to the Tribunal Administrativo del Deporte (TAD),  an administrative process, not a contractual/arbitral one.

Match-fixing: Levante v Real Zaragoza (2011)

On the final day of the 2010/11 La Liga season, Real Zaragoza won 2–1 away at Levante, securing survival and relegating Deportivo La Coruña. Prosecutors alleged that Zaragoza had funnelled approximately €965,000 to its own players as inducements to bribe Levante players to lose the match deliberately.

In December 2019, a Spanish court cleared 41 individuals, including current and former Real Zaragoza players, and the club itself of sporting corruption, citing a lack of sufficient evidence of match-fixing. Only the club’s former president, Agapito Iglesias, and former financial director, Javier Porquera, were convicted of falsifying documents, not match-fixing, and received suspended sentences of fifteen months each, in connection with over €1.73 million withdrawn ostensibly for player bonuses.

The closest Spanish analogue to a harmed club seeking redress: Deportivo La Coruña, the relegated club, joined the reopened criminal proceedings as an interested party, alongside LaLiga itself and state prosecutors. This is a materially different legal posture from the Burnley model, Deportivo participated in a criminal process as an injured party, rather than bringing a freestanding civil claim for compensation, and in any event, the acquittal on the substantive match-fixing charge meant no compensation route ever opened.

No other Spanish scandal examined for this report (including the more recent Barcelona ‘Negreira’ referee-payments investigation) has produced an inter-club damages claim. Rival clubs have issued statements of concern but have not pursued litigation against Barcelona directly.

Germany (Bundesliga): Compensation flows from the federation, not from rivals

Hoyzer scandal (2005)

Second-division referee Robert Hoyzer was found to have fixed matches in the 2. Bundesliga, the Regionalliga and the DFB-Pokal (German Cup) on behalf of a Croatian betting syndicate. The trigger match was SC Paderborn’s 4–2 DFB-Pokal victory over Bundesliga side Hamburger SV on 21 August 2004, a result attributed to Hoyzer’s manipulated officiating.

Who compensated whom?

The compensation pattern in the Hoyzer affair runs in precisely the opposite direction to the English model. The German Football Association (DFB) itself compensated Hamburger SV directly for its unjust cup exit, an initial payment of approximately €500,000, with a further sum reported as up to €1.5 million connected to a home international fixture, bringing the club’s total compensation to as much as approximately €2 million. The DFB also arranged restitution for other clubs affected by Hoyzer’s manipulated matches.

The DFB then itself sued Robert Hoyzer for approximately €1.8 million in 2007, to recover the costs of the compensation it had paid out. DFB president Theo Zwanziger stated at the time: ‘we have an obligation to do this as a non-profit organization.’

At no point in the Hoyzer affair did one club sue a rival club. The entire compensation flow ran federation-to-club (DFB paying Hamburger SV) and federation-to-individual-wrongdoer (DFB suing Hoyzer). This is structurally incompatible with the Burnley v Everton model, in which the claim ran directly between two competing member clubs.

Structural position under German law

DFL Lizenzierungsordnung (licensing regulation) breaches attract sanctions, fines, points deductions, forced relegation, administered through the league’s own disciplinary organs, with disputes referred to the Ständiges Schiedsgericht (a permanent arbitration tribunal constituted under §1029 of the German Code of Civil Procedure, the ZPO). This is a sanctions-only framework; it contains no rule comparable to Premier League Rule W.51.5.

German civil law does offer general tort liability under §823 BGB (delictual liability for unlawfully causing harm) and association liability under §31 BGB. A claim by one club against another is therefore theoretically conceivable outside the football rulebook entirely, as an ordinary civil tort claim. However, no such claim has been brought, and it would face a significant difficulty: a financial-rule breach causing a competitor’s relegation does not obviously constitute the infringement of a protected legal interest of the kind §823 BGB is designed to remedy, as opposed to a more conventional tort such as physical injury or property damage.

France (Ligue 1): DNCG model, claims run against the Federation

DNCG framework

France’s Direction Nationale du Contrôle de Gestion (DNCG), created in 1984 and operating under Article L.132-2 of the Code du sport, is widely regarded as the strictest financial regulator among the major European leagues. Its powers include recruitment bans, wage caps, and administrative relegation (rétrogradation), but these are administrative sanctions imposed on the regulated club itself, not a mechanism for awarding damages between two competing clubs.

Stade de Reims litigation

The single most instructive French precedent for this research is the Stade de Reims case before the Tribunal Administratif de Châlons-en-Champagne (decision of 15 January 2021, no. 1900125). The underlying complaint was that the DNCG had allegedly erred by wrongly permitting a rival club to avoid administrative relegation that should have been imposed for a financial breach, in effect, the inverse fact pattern to Burnley v Everton, where a club claimed it was harmed because a rival should have been sanctioned more severely (or earlier) than it was.

Critically, Stade de Reims’s claim was brought against the FFF (the French Football Federation, of which the DNCG is an organ) for the DNCG’s allegedly faulty decision, NOT against the rival club that had benefited from the allegedly lenient treatment. The tribunal considered the claim under administrative-tort principles and even rejected part of the asserted causal link between the DNCG’s decision and the claimed harm. This confirms that the French structural route for this type of grievance is an administrative-tort claim against the regulator, with no contractual inter-club mechanism anywhere in the LFP, FFF, or DNCG rules that would allow a direct claim against the rival club itself.

More recent DNCG decisions (including those issued in June 2026) have continued to impose administrative relegations and conditional financial measures on distressed Ligue 1 and Ligue 2 clubs, but none of these decisions has produced or triggered an inter-club compensation claim.

Other European Leagues

Portugal, Apito Dourado / Apito Final (2004–2008)

FC Porto and Boavista were implicated in a referee-corruption scandal. In the LPFP’s internal disciplinary process (concluded May 2008): Porto were docked six points and fined €150,000 for attempted bribery (the points were subsequently recovered in 2017); Boavista were relegated outright and fined €180,000 for consummated bribery and referee coercion; União de Leiria lost three points. UEFA briefly excluded Porto from the 2008/09 Champions League, before UEFA’s own Appeals Body annulled that exclusion. The subsequent criminal trials produced acquittals, including the acquittal of Porto president Jorge Pinto da Costa in 2009.

No club obtained compensation from a rival as a result of this scandal. The club most affected, Boavista, was itself a sanctioned party (relegated) and subsequently suffered serious financial collapse. Pinto da Costa was reported to have threatened recourse to ‘European civil courts’ at the time, but this was framed as a challenge by the sanctioned club to its own punishment, not a claim by a harmed rival seeking compensation.

Belgium, Operation Clean Hands / Operation Zero (2017–2019)

A large-scale criminal investigation into match-fixing, money laundering and private corruption implicated an estimated 16 of the 26 top-division Belgian clubs at the time. Civil parties joined to the criminal proceedings included the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA), the Pro League, and KFCO Beerschot Wilrijk, a club asserting it had suffered injury, making it the closest Belgian analogue to a harmed club seeking redress.

The Belgian matter has remained mired in a lengthy criminal process with no final convictions years after the investigation began. The Belgian Court of Arbitration for Sport (BAS) annulled part of the disciplinary sanctions originally imposed for lack of a sufficiently precise legislative basis, and a separate civil court annulled an arbitration award on fair-trial grounds. Belgian tax authorities separately pursued approximately €121.2 million from the football sector in connection with the same underlying conduct. No club has recovered damages from a rival in connection with this scandal.

The Netherlands

The Dutch football association (KNVB) confirmed instances of match-fixing, including a 2009 case involving Willem II, but no inter-club damages claim followed from any of these episodes.

Dutch inter-club legal activity has instead concerned governance decisions rather than financial wrongdoing. When the KNVB curtailed the 2019/20 season and cancelled promotion and relegation because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cambuur, De Graafschap and FC Utrecht each threatened or launched legal action, but against the KNVB itself, not against a rival club; a Dutch judge upheld the KNVB’s decision in May 2020. Separately, when FC Twente’s relegation for financial irregularities was overturned on appeal and replaced with a €180,000 fine, De Graafschap was relegated instead in Twente’s place, again producing a club-versus-federation dynamic rather than any inter-club damages claim.

Scotland, Rangers employee benefit trusts case

The ‘Big Tax Case’ (RFC 2012 Plc v Advocate General for Scotland [2017] UKSC 45) concluded that Rangers’ use of employee benefit trusts (approximately £47 million between 2001 and 2010) constituted taxable earnings that should have been subject to PAYE and National Insurance. The Nimmo Smith Commission (2012) fined the ‘oldco’ £250,000 but declined to strip any titles won during the relevant period, on the basis that it found no sporting advantage had resulted from the non-disclosure of these payments.

Despite sustained public campaigning (the ‘#stripthetitles’ movement) and a formal request from Celtic for the matter to be reviewed, the SPFL and SFA opened no fresh investigation, and  no rival Scottish club sued Rangers for compensation. This is a particularly instructive negative case: the underlying wrong (using an undisclosed tax-advantaged structure to fund squad spending) closely resembles the type of financial-rules breach at issue in Burnley v Everton, yet Scotland’s governance framework offered no equivalent inter-club damages mechanism, and none was attempted.

UEFA and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS)

UEFA’s Club Financial Control Body imposes financial sanctions, fines, spending restrictions, competition exclusion, and has reached settlement agreements with major clubs including Juventus (2023), Paris Saint-Germain and Galatasaray, some of which have proceeded to CAS. CAS’s own jurisprudence on inter-club compensation is confined to contractual matters arising from player transfers and contract breaches (for example, the Matuzalem / Real Zaragoza v Shakhtar Donetsk line of cases on the ‘positive interest’ measure of damages for a player’s breach of contract).

No instance was identified of a club recovering damages from a rival through UEFA’s own disciplinary bodies or through CAS, specifically in respect of a rival’s breach of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play or Club Licensing regulations. Such a follow-on claim is theoretically possible in addition to UEFA’s own regulatory sanctions, but none has, to date, been brought.

England: The full picture beyond Tevez and Burnley v Everton

The compensation power has been renumbered across successive editions of the Premier League Handbook, Rule W.51.5 in the 2021/22 edition (the rule applied in Burnley v Everton), W.52.5 in 2024/25, and W.55.5 in the 2025/26 edition, but its substance has remained consistent throughout: a disciplinary commission may order ‘compensation unlimited in amount to any … person or club.’ 

The EFL’s own rulebook contains a near-identical power in Regulation 93, empowering a commission to ‘order the payment of compensation to … any other club,’ with any appeal proceeding to the League Arbitration Panel. Rule X of the Premier League Rules separately provides the arbitration architecture (consistent with the Arbitration Act 1996) that keeps these disputes outside the ordinary civil courts while preserving them as enforceable contractual claims between members.

 Loss-of-chance doctrine applied

The Commission in Burnley v Everton applied the two-stage test from Allied Maples Group Ltd v Simmons & Simmons [1995] 1 WLR 1602: first, the claimant must prove on the balance of probabilities that it would have taken the relevant chance; second, damages are then assessed and discounted by reference to the percentage probability that the favourable outcome would in fact have materialised. The doctrine’s application in a football context is not without precedent, see also McGill v Sports & Entertainment Media Group [2016] EWCA Civ 1063, a loss-of-chance case concerning a footballer’s agent.

In Burnley v Everton, the Commission preferred Burnley’s so -called “expert” modelling, which effectively ‘re-ran’ the relevant Premier League season, attributing Everton’s £19.5 million in PSR overspend to approximately four additional points, the precise margin that separated Premier League survival from relegation that season. On the balance of probabilities, the Commission found that Everton’s breach of the Profitability and Sustainability Rules had caused Burnley’s relegation. Burnley had originally claimed £51.7 million; the Commission awarded £26.0 million in principal compensation, plus £9.1 million in pre-award interest (accruing at 11.81%), for a combined sum of approximately £35.1 million.

The Commission also rejected Everton’s argument that the relevant breach crystallised only at its financial year-end (30 June 2022), after Burnley’s actual relegation on 22 May 2022, and so could not, as a matter of timing, have caused that relegation. The Commission instead construed the Profitability and Sustainability Rules purposively, treating the breach as a continuing ‘state of affairs’ persisting through the season rather than a single point-in-time event crystallising only at the year-end.

Other and threatened English claims

Of the five clubs given 28 days from 17 November 2023 to signal an intention to pursue compensation claims against Everton in connection with the same PSR breach:

Press reporting (cited but not independently confirmed by this research) suggests Leeds United may separately be weighing a further claim arising from Leicester City’s own PSR issues.

Live test case: Manchester City

Against the backdrop of Manchester City’s 115 (originally reported, now widely described as covering breaches across 2009/10–2017/18), it is reported that Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Tottenham have each initiated arbitration procedures specifically to preserve compensation rights, having served legal notices on City in 2024 to protect their position before any applicable six-year limitation period expires (the relevant trigger date being linked to the 5 November 2018 Football Leaks publication, which first brought the underlying allegations to public attention). 

Each of these four clubs is reported to estimate potential losses ‘significantly more than £100 million,’ covering lost prize money and lost Champions League participation revenues, plus interest. Some reporting suggests that as many as 35 clubs that finished below Manchester City in relevant seasons could, in principle, have a claim. Chelsea is reported to have declined to pursue a claim against City, in light of Chelsea’s own self-reported Financial Fair Play investigation and settlement.

As of the most recent information available to this research, the Manchester City liability verdict remained unpublished more than sixteen months after closing arguments concluded. All claims described in this subsection are preserved or threatened claims pending that verdict, and none has yet been brought to a substantive hearing equivalent to Burnley v Everton.

Cross-cutting legal analysis: Why England Is different

Three diagnostic questions

Three questions determine, in any given jurisdiction, whether a Burnley-style claim is even theoretically possible:

Available commentary converges clearly on the conclusion that the English mechanism is unusual rather than typical.

My own analysis covered throughout the Analysis Series, has observed that inter-competitor liability of this kind ‘depends critically on whether the governance framework provides that mechanism explicitly. Football did; rugby did not’,  a comparative point about English sport generally, not football specifically, but one that captures precisely why this mechanism exists in the Premier League and EFL. Commentary on the International Sports Law Journal notes that UK private sports governing bodies enjoy ‘contractual freedom to organise their own sports tribunals,’ operating without overarching governing legislation, the foundational reason a member club can stand as a true claimant seeking damages from a fellow member, rather than merely petitioning a public regulator for a sanction. 

Law firms including Norton Rose Fulbright, Hogan Lovells, Clarion and Capital Law have each separately characterised the Burnley v Everton decision as a ‘watershed’ moment that converts a regulatory breach into a genuine civil-liability event between competing businesses, while each firm has also cautioned that the Everton appeal remains pending and the principle is not yet finally settled.

Benchmarks That would change this analysis

Caveats