IT HAS BEEN an embarrassing month for football’s wealthiest clubs. Der Spiegel, a German magazine, has published several articles—using excerpts from leaked emails and documents—that appear to show elite teams bullying UEFA, the sport’s administrative body in Europe, into giving them a greater cut of tournament winnings and smaller penalties for breaking rules. The accused clubs claim that they were merely proposing constructive reforms. But for most football fans, the furore has reinforced the impression that the rich are strong-arming the rest—and that the Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations which UEFA created to encourage competitive balance have proved useless.

The uproar began on November 2nd when Der Spiegelpublished messages which implied that a cartel of elite teams were plotting a breakaway “super league”. The conspirators had planned to invite 18 clubs to secede from their national divisions, in pursuit of the greater riches offered by an exclusive international franchise. The plans also mentioned the possibility of a second tier.

Unsurprisingly, the clubs left off the guest list were livid. So were supporters, including those of the conspiring teams. They have argued that Europe already has international tournaments, such as the Champions League, and that multi-tiered domestic leagues are part of the game’s appeal. An invites-only competition could never have an underdog winner like Leicester City, who won the English Premier League in 2016 as 5,000-to-one longshots after languishing in lower divisions for most of the 21st century.

Der Spiegel also claimed that Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), two nouveau-riche clubs backed by sheikhs from the Gulf, had negotiated with administrators to receive only puny fines after breaking FFP rules. UEFA introduced these regulations in 2011, by threatening to boot clubs out of the Champions League if their spending exceeded their revenues by more than €45m ($51m) over two years. By 2014 the Qatari royal family had underwritten losses of €218m for PSG, Der Spiegel reported, while royals from the United Arab Emirates had covered Manchester City’s deficit of €188m. The owners siphoned most of this money into their clubs via absurdly inflated sponsorship deals from Middle Eastern companies. In spite of these brazen violations, UEFA gave each club a €20m fine and allowed them to remain in the Champions League.

Some of these details were old news. Rumours of a breakaway super league have been circulating for at least 20 years. UEFA announced its timid punishments for Manchester City and PSG in 2014. But Der Spiegel has startling evidence of how aggressively Europe’s elite clubs bullied UEFA. It describes the tactics used by the super-league cartel as “extremely close to blackmail”. The clubs allegedly revealed their secession plans to UEFA, before insisting that the only way to prevent such an exodus would be to give teams with a long heritage in the Champions League extra money each year. UEFA caved in.

The tactics that Der Spiegel describes Manchester City and PSG using when negotiating with UEFA about FFP punishments are equally intimidating. The magazine cites an internal email from the English club, which states that Khaldoon al-Mubarak, the chairman, “would rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue [UEFA] for the next 10 years” than accept a financial penalty. Nasser al-Khelaifi, PSG’s president, reportedly warned UEFA that upsetting Qatar, which will host the next World Cup, was not a good idea. The administrators’ responses were fawning. Michel Platini, then the body’s president, wrote to Manchester City’s owners that “we understand and like what they are doing with the club”. When emailing the same owners about the small impending fine, Gianni Infantino, UEFA’s general secretary, told them: “I would also like to thank you for your trust. You know you can trust me.” The reactions from the accused clubs and officials have ranged from self-righteous protest to wary deflection—though they did not dispute the veracity of Der Spiegel’s evidence. FIFA, the global governing body of which Mr Infantino is now the president, cried fake news: “It seems obvious from the ‘reporting’ carried out in some media outlets that there is only one particular aim: an attempt to undermine the new leadership of FIFA.” UEFA said that it could reopen old FFP cases if it found new evidence that the rules had been abused. Manchester City refused to comment on “out of context material”. PSG stopped short of directly disputing Der Spiegel’s excerpts, while defending the value of its sponsorship deals. Officials at Arsenal, one of the super-league clubs, admitted that they had discussed the idea with other teams, but had never wanted to leave the Premier League. “At the end of the day the outcome was the best possible”, said Raul Sanllehi, the club’s director of football. “We got into a new deal with UEFA, within the system that protects the domestic leagues.” Some are more equal than others

Mr Infantino also claimed that UEFA’s reforms to the Champions League were a sort of victory: “We were doing our job and saved the system and we saved European club football.” But it is increasingly obvious that UEFA needs the elite clubs more than they need an interfering supervisor. The relationship has come to resemble regulatory capture—in which powerful groups within an industry gain favours from an overseeing government agency that is supposed to protect the public interest.

UEFA insists that this is not the case. On November 19th Aleksander Ceferin, the current president, defended its record on fighting inequality in football. “Unfortunately in the world many times it happens that the rich become richer. I think we are one of the rare organisations in the world that tackles this problem.” The administrators often point to FFP as an example of progressive policymaking. In fact, these rules have widened the gap between the haves and have-nots.

When Mr Platini, UEFA’s then-president, introduced FFP in 2009, he promised “financial and moral solidarity between the top and the bottom of our pyramid.” This is the closest that European football has ever come to the budgetary caps that encourage competitive balance in American sports. As well as preventing “financial doping”, whereby tycoons purchase clubs as vanity projects and pump cash into them, FFP aimed to reduce football’s debt problem. In 2011 top-division clubs in 54 European countries made combined losses of €1.7bn. UEFA reckoned that if it prevented teams from spending money that they did not earn, the sport’s top echelons would be more meritocratic.

Seven years on, domestic football is in much better financial health. In 2017 European clubs made a net profit of €600m. But UEFA’s hope that this would improve competitive balance was misplaced. By tying what a club could spend to the wealth it brought in, FFP entrenched the position of famous sides that already had substantial followings. These have proved adept at growing their commercial income, especially abroad. According to data from Deloitte, a consultancy, in 2018 Europe’s 13 richest clubs earned 41% of the revenue in the continent’s “big five” leagues (those in England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France). They collected just 34% of that income in 2012 (see chart). In a paper on the effects of FFP Markus Sass, a German academic, observed that it causes “an utmost uneven competitive balance in the long run, where big clubs totally dominate small clubs.” Mr Sass identified that although “sugar daddy owners” introduce financial instability, they also disrupt existing oligopolies. In England, the only title-winners between 1995 and 2004 were venerable Manchester United and Arsenal. That duopoly was broken in 2005 when Roman Abramovich, a Russian commodities magnate, showered his wealth on Chelsea. Manchester City’s sheikhs followed Mr Abramovich’s lead when they purchased the club in 2008. Even lowly Leicester had a sugar daddy, the late Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, who propelled the club back into the Premier League. In February the Foxes were fined £3.1m ($4m) for registering a loss of £20.8m in 2014, the year that they achieved promotion. As FFP has made such ventures less attractive for the world’s ball-watching billionaires, Europe’s incumbent powers have crushed their competitors. In Italy, Juventus have won seven straight league titles. In Germany, Bayern Munich have won six in a row. And in France, PSG have won five of the last six. The only exception was in 2017, at which point PSG paid usurpers Monaco €180m for their star player, Kylian Mbappé. He regained the title for the Parisians in 2018. The television deal will not be revolutionised

Der Spiegel’s reporting reveals a vicious cycle of inequality. Rich clubs get richer, because FFP prevents poor ones from spending enough to challenge them. This makes domestic leagues more predictable, and encourages elite teams to devise more exciting tournaments. It also gives these clubs more financial clout for bullying UEFA, which then implements policies that make them even richer. And so it goes on, with oligopoly and regulatory capture getting worse.

To fight back, UEFA will have to alter FFP in a way that unleashes competition while preventing unlimited spending. In other words, it needs to incentivise more upstarts like Manchester City and PSG, but also to ensure that they follow the rules.

It has made some steps in the right direction. This season it has introduced a limit of €100m net spending per year on transfer fees—meaning that high-rolling teams can only spend €500m on buying players if they have generated sales of €400m. The new rules also include greater transparency requirements, such as publishing more wage data and payments to agents, says Darren Bailey of Charles Russell Speechlys, a law firm. This should make it harder for the likes of Manchester City and PSG to bend the rules.

But this will act mostly as an extra drag on the rich teams, rather than giving a boost to poor ones. To do that, UEFA could also abolish the original FFP rules. This would allow every club to spend up to €100m net on players of each year, regardless of where the money came from. Elite clubs would face similar constraints to the ones that exist now, while owners of smaller teams would have the chance to catch up.

A more radical solution to football’s inequality problem would be for the clubs themselves to create a fairer system. The history of American sports suggests that collective action by competing teams is the most effective way to divide wealth evenly, to limit irresponsible spending and to ensure that the same sides do not win every year. Football clubs have rarely shown the same collaborative spirit, perhaps because the historical dominance of giants like Bayern Munich and Juventus has given them little incentive to negotiate with smaller rivals.

There is one notable exception. In the early 1990s, a group of England’s richest clubs threatened to form a breakaway competition from the Football League, which had been running since 1888. Eventually they did so. The new competition, called the Premier League, was still integrated with old system, so that teams could be promoted and relegated as before. Its real innovation was to introduce a collective-bargaining system for television deals, so that the league shared revenue far more evenly than other national competitions did.

In 2017 the Premier League club with the highest television income earned only 60% more than the side with the lowest. The other leagues in Europe’s “big five” have started to spread their revenues more evenly, but all have a first-to-last gap of at least 200%. None has been as ambitious as the smaller Dutch league, which from 2020 will require teams competing in UEFA tournaments to share 5% of their revenues with those that did not qualify.

Today England remains the only major league in which at least six teams can reasonably hope win the title. A European breakaway might be derided by fans, and it might never happen. But unless clubs are willing to revamp their leagues in ways that give competitors an equal stake, spectators will have to endure the same old winners every year.