The Super League won in court and died anyway

In short: the Super League won. The EU Court of Justice ruled in December 2023 that UEFA’s prior-authorisation rules breached EU competition law. Spanish courts went further and found an abuse of dominant position. A22 and Real Madrid prepared damages claims reported at around €4.5 billion. Then, on 11 February 2026, Real Madrid settled with UEFA and withdrew, and the project ended. It had cleared every legal obstacle and could not clear the only one that mattered.

Most accounts of the Super League end in April 2021, when nine of the twelve founders withdrew within seventy-two hours. That is the famous part. It is not the interesting part.

The interesting part is the five years afterwards, in which the project was vindicated by court after court and died anyway.

What the Court of Justice actually decided

On 21 December 2023 the Court of Justice of the European Union gave judgment in Case C-333/21, European Superleague Company v FIFA and UEFA, and it is routinely misreported in both directions.

The court did not rule that the Super League must be allowed to exist. It ruled on the process by which FIFA and UEFA decide such questions. Rules requiring their prior approval for a new competition, backed by threats of sanction, are contrary to EU competition law when they are not subject to criteria that are transparent, objective, non-discriminatory and proportionate.

That is a procedural finding with sharp teeth. A governing body that also organises the competition it is deciding about has an obvious conflict, and the court said that conflict must be constrained by published, reviewable criteria rather than exercised at discretion.

UEFA had already amended its authorisation rules before the judgment landed and maintained that the new version complied. That question — whether the replacement rules are themselves transparent, objective and proportionate — is the one that kept the dispute alive.

The Spanish courts went further

The litigation had begun in Madrid, and it continued there.

The Juzgado de lo Mercantil nº 17 de Madrid applied the Court of Justice’s reasoning and found for the promoters, declaring the authorisation and sanctioning rules unlawful. In late 2025 the Audiencia Provincial de Madrid upheld that ruling in full, dismissing the appeals brought by UEFA, LaLiga and the Spanish federation, and confirming a finding of abuse of dominant position.

That is a materially stronger outcome than the Luxembourg judgment. A procedural defect can be cured by rewriting the rules. An abuse of dominance is a wrong, and a wrong that causes loss can be quantified.

Which is what happened next: A22 and Real Madrid began preparing damages claims reported at roughly €4.5 billion.

Meanwhile, the product kept shrinking

While the law went the promoters’ way, the competition itself was repeatedly redesigned to be less like the thing everyone had objected to.

The 2021 version was twenty clubs, fifteen of them permanent founders with guaranteed places — the closed shop that caused the revolt. In December 2024 A22 relaunched it as the Unify League: ninety-six clubs across four tiers, qualification based on domestic performance, running September to April.

Read the two designs side by side and the concession is total. Almost nothing that made the original commercially attractive to its founders survived. What remained was a rival competition with open qualification — which is to say, something quite like the Champions League, without the Champions League’s history or its clubs.

In November 2025 A22’s chief executive sent UEFA an eighteen-page letter demanding pre-authorisation of the Unify League within eight weeks. By then, seven months of negotiation had already produced nothing.

How it ended

9 February 2026: Barcelona formally withdrew.

11 February 2026: Real Madrid, UEFA and the European Football Clubs — the body formerly known as the ECA — announced an agreement of principles. Real Madrid’s statement said it would “serve to resolve their legal disputes related to the European Super League, once a definitive agreement is implemented.”

Real Madrid was the last founder standing. Its withdrawal ended the project, and the €4.5 billion claim went with it.

Why winning was not enough

The Super League’s problem was never really legal. It was that it needed other clubs, and other clubs were never going to come.

A court can strike down a rule that forbids you from organising a competition. It cannot compel anyone to enter. Once the English clubs left in 2021 under supporter pressure, and the Italians and Atlético followed, the remaining founders were negotiating for the right to launch a competition nobody else wanted to play in. Each redesign was an attempt to make the product acceptable to clubs whose objection was not the format but the association.

So the promoters accumulated judgments they could not spend. The rulings established a real and lasting principle about how governing bodies must exercise authorisation power — but a principle is not a competition.

What actually survives

The judgments do. Whatever happened to the Super League, the law changed, and it changed for everybody.

UEFA can no longer refuse a new competition on unwritten discretion. Any prior-approval regime it operates must rest on criteria that are transparent, objective, non-discriminatory and proportionate, and those criteria are reviewable in court. The next promoter — and there will be one — starts from a position the Super League paid to establish.

There is a second legacy, less discussed. The dispute was resolved in a settlement between UEFA, one club and the body representing Europe’s clubs. Not by a regulator, not by a legislature, and in the end not by a court. That tells you something about who actually governs European football — and it is the same lesson as the multi-club ownership cases: the rules bend for whoever can afford to argue about them.