The European Court of Justice (ECJ) stated on Thursday that UEFA's rule on football clubs needing to include eight home-grown players in their squad lists does not comply with European law. The legal opinion was a response to a previous complaint filed by the Belgian club Royal Antwerp.
The Flemish side had argued in 2021 that UEFA's rules limited players' freedom of movement within the European Union, one of the institution's tenets. European football's leading body requires that 25-man football squads contain at least eight home-grown players.
Royal Antwerp took issue with the UEFA's definition of a home-grown player. The Court states that these players are those trained by the club in question, or by another club in the same national league, for at least three years between the ages of 15 and 21.
While UEFA demands that at least four out of the eight home-grown players are trained by the club, the Royal Belgian Football Association - which falls under UEFA's jurisdiction - does not.
Having originally issued their complaint to a Belgian court, the matter was then transferred to the ECJ, who agreed with Royal Antwerp's arguments. The court's advocate general Maciej Szpunar explained that the UEFA's rule on home-grown players discriminated against other EU nationals with no proper justification.
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While the court admitted that such discrimination may be justifiable in the context of training and recruiting young players, it doubted how UEFA's definition of home-grown players would achieve these goals.
Indeed, by allowing these players to have been trained by other clubs, the court doubted how it would push them to train their academy squad members. Especially given that they have the possibility of simply buying young players from other clubs in the same league.
Szpunar thus concluded that for UEFA's rules and regulations to comply with European law, their definition had to remove the possibility of home-grown players being trained at other clubs.
