UEFA plans to reveal salaries of football players

The European Football Union is pushing for greater transparency from clubs. New rules will also affect Slovak ones.

The European Football Union UEFA is preparing further steps to maintain the financial stability of clubs that will compete in next season’s Champions League and Europa League. According to Reuters, changes were proposed at last week’s Executive Committee meeting in Kyiv under which the disclosure of financial data – such as wage costs or payments to player agents for transfers – would become part of the licensing process for participation in European competitions. These proposals are to be incorporated into the Financial Fair Play rules, in place for several years, which have significantly reduced the indebtedness of football clubs across Europe. “The most positive aspect of the proposal is that such financial data should now be disclosed right after the transfer window closes, and not only at the end of the season or fiscal year as was the case until now,” sports analyst and football agent Jozef Tokos told the Economic Daily.

The disclosure proposal
We looked into how these UEFA initiatives could also affect Slovak football clubs – specifically Spartak Trnava, Slovan, Dunajska Streda, and Trencin, which will play in European competitions next season. “For now, we only have a draft of the new licensing directive. But we do not have information on the scope and form in which it was approved,” said Milan Vojtek, deputy general secretary and head of the sports and administrative department of the Slovak Football Association. As a member of UEFA’s Club Licensing Committee, he is aware of the proposal requiring clubs to publish audited financial statements and payments to agents for transfer mediation. However, he had no further details on how and from when the rules might apply in practice.

The fact remains that every football club that has earned the right to compete in UEFA competitions must hold a licence. “We report the awarded licences to UEFA on May 31, so we are preparing to do that these days,” Vojtek revealed. The basic principle of Financial Fair Play is for clubs to remain financially healthy. A violation occurs if a club’s debt for one season exceeds five million euros. “The debt can rise to as much as 30 million, but in that case the club must guarantee that the excess is covered, for example, through the sale of a player or a bank loan,” Vojtek noted. So far, no Slovak club has violated these rules.

Transparency to increase
UEFA expects that the introduction of the new rules will further increase transparency and fairness in football. The credibility of the sport was undermined last year by the multimillion-euro acquisitions of French club Paris St. Germain, which paid 222 million euros for Brazilian Neymar and additional millions for striker Mbappé. “These cases show how important it will be to publish data immediately after the transfer window closes. To this day, the financial year has not been closed, and we do not know how Neymar’s transfer was reflected in the Paris club’s accounts,” Tokos said.

In the coming weeks, UEFA will check clubs’ compliance with Financial Fair Play rules. If any club is found to be in violation, sanctions will follow. The harshest penalty is exclusion from the Champions League or Europa League; others include a ban on player transfers, restrictions on the number of registered players, or fines. The most recent example of UEFA banning a club from competition is Switzerland’s FC Sion. The suspension applies to the next two seasons and was imposed for breaches of licensing and financial rules during the transfer of Ghanaian forward Ishmael Yartey from Sochaux. Sion also owed money to the other party and failed to provide credible information.