The Law Written by Giants: How Real Madrid, Barcelona and Man City Draft Their Own Rulebook

A Beer at Three in the Morning

In April 2026, at three in the morning Shenzhen time, I sat in a small bar in Nanshan District, rewatching the clip of Florentino Pérez explaining the Super League on a Spanish television channel. My beer sat untouched on the table, not a single sip taken. What I saw on the screen was a draft statute, written by the very people it was meant to regulate.

That same week, in another time zone, a story with an identical structure was unfolding, and almost nobody in football noticed. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang — the men behind Tesla, Meta and Nvidia — were reported to have met President Donald Trump at the White House to discuss the forthcoming artificial intelligence safety bill. The goal of the meeting: to make sure that bill did not touch them too hard.

On the other side of the debate, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Sam Altman of OpenAI spoke in the opposite direction. Hassabis proposed an independent AI safety oversight body, placed beyond the reach of the corporations. Amodei and Altman warned that without clear common standards, the industry would burn itself down.

Let me be clear about sourcing before going further. The entire chain of events above began with a report in The Wall Street Journal, later relayed by The Independent and numerous other outlets. The details of the Oval Office meeting rest on anonymous sources. This is a single-point sourcing chain — one origin, relayed many times through editorial layers. I say this first, because I am the kind of writer who always demands data and sources.

Beer untasted, bet unplaced, yet I recognised the tone. It was the voice of Florentino Pérez in 2026. It was the voice of Europe's football giants over the past fifteen years, every time UEFA or the Premier League reached into their pockets.

Context: Fifteen Years of One Pattern

In 2026, UEFA announced Financial Fair Play, known as FFP, formally applied from the 2026-12 season. The core idea: a club may not spend more than it earns. It sounded reasonable.

But who drafted FFP? Representatives of Europe's biggest clubs, through the European Club Association — the body in which Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Juventus hold the key seats. G14, its predecessor, was founded in 2026 and dissolved in 2026 to make way for a more formal structure with seats on UEFA committees.

In 2026, FFP bit for the first time. Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain were fined 60 million euros, with caps on the number of players they could register in European competition. Both accepted settlements. That fine, against their budgets, amounted to an administrative fee.

In 2026, Der Spiegel and the Football Leaks network published documents concerning payments alleged to have been routed around Manchester City's books. UEFA opened an investigation. In February 2026, UEFA banned Manchester City from European competition for two seasons and fined them 30 million euros. In July 2026, the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne overturned the ban and reduced the fine to 10 million euros.

That was the first time I understood the real structure of the game. The question is not whether rules exist. It is at what speed the rules are enforced, and against whom.

In February 2026, the Premier League published a charge sheet of 115 alleged breaches against Manchester City covering the 2026-2026 period. That same month, the technology world had its own news: a group of AI executives was lobbying to keep the AI safety bill from being applied too tightly.

Two headlines, two industries, one pattern. The strongest institutions are trying to shape the very system of rules that governs them.

In football, that pattern has a history far longer than FFP. In 2026, a group of English clubs broke away from the Football League to found the Premier League, and negotiated their own collective television rights. In 2026, the Super League was reborn within 72 hours and collapsed. In December 2026, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in the Super League case that certain UEFA and FIFA rules could be contrary to European Union competition law.

Every time, what changes is not the law of the game on the pitch. What changes is the law of how the money is split.

Analysis: Who Sits in the Drafting Room

This is where I want to place my bet.

Most analysis of the Super League or FFP stops at the moral question: are the big clubs greedy? That question is meaningless. The right question is: who has the power to write the rules, and who are those rules written to protect?

Look at the structure of Financial Fair Play.

FFP forces clubs to break even. That sounds neutral. But what does break even mean? It means revenue. And what makes up revenue? Broadcast rights, sponsorship contracts, ticket sales, image rights. How are those four sources distributed across European football? Big clubs take a larger broadcast share based on finishing position, they have bigger stadiums, and they have global fame that lets them sign better sponsorship deals.

Financial Fair Play does exactly one thing: it freezes the current revenue hierarchy into a legal hierarchy.

A small club that wants to climb must spend more than the others. The rules forbid them from spending more than the others. Manchester City in 2026 and Chelsea in 2026 — two clubs lifted by outside investment before FFP took effect — were the last two cases able to move that way. Since 2026, no club has bought a place among Europe's elite with a single owner's money alone.

This is the point most discussion misses. European football is not choosing between no rules and rules. It is choosing between several versions of rules, and the version chosen is the one that benefits the majority of clubs holding seats in the European Club Association.

In 2026, when the Premier League charged Everton and docked them 10 points — later reduced to 6 on appeal — and then docked Nottingham Forest 4 points, I tracked the reaction from lower-tier clubs. They did not object to being docked. They objected to the asymmetry: Manchester City, with 115 charges, still had no verdict, while Everton lost points after only a few months of investigation.

That asymmetry has a name in legal practice: litigation capacity. A club with dozens of lawyers, hiring counsel in London, Switzerland and Singapore, can stretch a case over many years. A mid-table club has no such shield. The rules are the same. The way they land is not.

And when the rules are no longer written your way, what do the big owners do? They change the institution that writes the rules.

In April 2026, twelve clubs announced the Super League. The announcement contained a detail few noticed: the original leadership of the Super League included Florentino Pérez, Andrea Agnelli of Juventus and Joel Glazer of Manchester United — men who simultaneously held roles in the European Club Association, the body negotiating with UEFA over Champions League format changes. They sat at both tables. The table that drafts the rules, and the table set to create a different one.

The Super League collapsed within 72 hours because English supporters took to the streets. But over the following two years, the changes still happened. The new Champions League format with 36 teams, the so-called Swiss model, was approved in May 2026 and applied from the 2026-25 season. More matches. More revenue for the top group of clubs.

I followed the 2026-25 Champions League league phase from an apartment in Shenzhen, usually two matches side by side on two screens. Eight matches in the league phase, each team playing four at home and four away, with the final standings deciding the knockout opponents. It is a commercially clever format. It is not a football-clever format. Big clubs can finish between 9th and 24th and still advance, which means lower early-elimination risk and more matches to sell tickets for.

Alongside it sits the Premier League's Profit and Sustainability Rules, known as PSR. In June 2026, the Premier League approved a new rule: squad cost ratio capped at 85 percent of revenue, progressively replacing PSR from the 2026-27 season. In Europe, UEFA's squad cost rule — capping wages, transfers and agent fees at 70 percent of revenue, effective from 2026-25 — was likewise designed by a board with club representation.

Once again, who sits in the drafting room? The very clubs those rules will regulate.

This is not a secret operation. It is public, legal, and minuted. The problem lies in how natural it feels: we treat the regulated writing the regulations as normal.

Now back to AI. When Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang were reported to be lobbying President Donald Trump to keep the AI safety bill from being tightened too far, the public reaction was capitalism lobbying. But the structure is identical to the European Club Association negotiating with UEFA: the parties about to be regulated sit in the room where the rules are drafted.

The difference between the two industries is speed. AI has product cycles measured in months. Football has contract cycles measured in years, and rule cycles measured in decades. But the power structure is isomorphic.

What football's giants are pursuing is not the abolition of rules, but a monopoly on writing them. They do not need to escape the rules. They need to sit in the drafting room — which the Super League tried to do crudely, failed, and then did again more subtly through the Champions League format and the squad cost ratio.

There is one more layer few discuss: technology.

European football is increasingly dependent on AI infrastructure — coaching support models, scouting data analytics, semi-automated offside systems, bookmaker pricing models. If AI safety rules in the United States or the European Union tighten the cost of computation and data infrastructure, that cost will flow down to the analytics vendors clubs already employ. A data centre serving an AI model in Manchester consumes many times the electricity of a stadium. That is a transmission line running from AI law into football, and it is long, and it will take years to become visible. I raise it as a hypothesis, not a conclusion.

There is one more loophole I consider more serious than all of the above: free agents.

In July 2026, Kylian Mbappé joined Real Madrid on a free transfer after his Paris Saint-Germain contract expired. No transfer fee was recorded. But there was a signing fee, reported in various outlets at around 100 million euros, spread across the length of the contract. How is that accounted for in financial fair play books? It does not sit in the transfer fee column. It sits in the wages and signing fees column, amortised.

A signing fee for a free agent is a tool for slipping past the core of FFP scrutiny. It is legal. It is disclosed. And it turns a deal worth hundreds of millions into something invisible on the transfer balance sheet. If you want to know what is really shifting the balance of power in Europe, do not look at the Super League. Look at the signing fee invoice.

At the same time, another form of rule-shaping is underway: multi-club ownership. City Football Group has a presence at more than ten clubs across several continents. The Red Bull network runs multiple teams in multiple leagues. INEOS controls Manchester United, Nice and Lausanne. When multi-club ownership rules are debated, the people doing the debating are the owners of those networks.

And when Newcastle United were acquired by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund in October 2026 for around 305 million pounds, the Premier League had to rewrite its associated party transaction rules — the sponsorship contracts between clubs and companies under the same ownership. The affected clubs sued, and in November 2026 the rules were amended after an arbitration.

Every time, the rules do not disappear. They get rewritten. And the people rewriting them are still the people under them.

Where I Could Be Wrong

Now to where I could be wrong.

The argument that people write rules to protect themselves sounds very solid. But it has one fatal weakness: it explains everything, which means it explains nothing. If every regulation is a product of self-defence, why was Everton docked points, why was Nottingham Forest docked points, why was Juventus docked 15 points and then 10 in the 2026-23 season, why did Barcelona have to sell 25 percent of its future television rights for 25 years — the so-called levers — just to register players?

If the rules existed only to protect their authors, Manchester City would not have faced more than two years of investigation across 115 charges. If the rules existed only to protect their authors, Chelsea would not have had to restructure its eight-year contract model after UEFA closed the amortisation loophole in June 2026.

Here is what I must concede: football's rules do still bite, but the bite is selective in speed. The weak lose points fast. The strong are investigated slowly. Both get bitten. One just gets bitten earlier and the other later — if at all.

That is a weaker argument, less dramatic to read. But it is more accurate.

My second blind spot: I am obsessed with power structures, so I tend to overlook real change. In the 2026-25 season, some mid-table Premier League clubs spent more wisely, used better scouting data, and across many matchdays the gap between the European places and the relegation zone compressed. That is not the sharks letting go of the meat. But if I only look at meeting rooms, I will not see it.

I once wrote that Lamine Yamal was a media product, that he was not yet big enough to be called a wonder. I cited data: he created around 2.1 key passes per match at that stage, while Pedri created nearly double. Then Euro 2026 arrived, and he scored from outside the box into the far corner, sending Spain to the final. I had to write again. What happens on the pitch is usually truer than what happens in the meeting room.

People who write about meeting rooms risk losing the ability to see the pitch. That is why I still watch four matches a week, even in the weeks I write only about regulations.

There is one more possibility I must leave open: perhaps the convergence between football and AI I am drawing is only a cognitive illusion. I see a pattern because I was trained to see patterns. Another analyst could look at the same two headlines and see two entirely unrelated stories. If so, this piece is a bad analogy, not an analysis.

Conclusion: A Falsifiable Prediction

The bar taught me how to read a match; the team sheet only distracts me. But the bar never taught me how to read who is sitting in the drafting room. That is something I have to learn by reading minutes and balance sheets.

My prediction, placed here to be checked:

By 2028, European football's flagship financial regulation will contain an exemption clause reserved for a small group of the highest-revenue clubs, under a technical label — historical coefficient, brand weighting, or heritage threshold. It will not be called the Super League. It will be called fighting inequality.

And if I am wrong, I will write again. As I did with Yamal.

The stadium is empty, but my audience has never left.