Hello and welcome to another Emlex podcast. I'm Laurel Henning, Senior Energy Correspondent,

and today we're coming to you from Emlex's Brussels Bureau and joining me is Antitrust

Correspondent, Mary Eccles. Hi Mary. Hi, Laurel. So football or soccer, the beautiful game. It's a sport where reputations are made and broken within just 90 minutes,

and the fortunes amassed, if you're successful,

can be astronomical with players earning salaries up to more than $90 million.

And as teams prepare for next year's World Cup,

some surprising links are being made to European competition law.

Mary, your story links the phrase, slavery with multi-millionaire soccer stars,

and that's because of third-party ownership, something I haven't come across in my energy reporting.

So can you explain to our listeners what that is and why this has become a legal issue recently?

Sure, so third-party ownership is when a private investor buys up part of the economic rights of a soccer player.

So in practice, what this has looked like in the past is the investor will stump up some cash to buy the player's rights when they're 13 or 14, when they're pretty young.

And then when the player moves elsewhere

to a different club, the investment company can take a proportion of the player's transfer fee,

which, as you said, can often reach millions of euros. So it's become a legal issue recently

because TPO was actually banned by FIFA in 2015, and that's now being challenged in the Belgian courts by an

investor group called Doyen Sports. So they say that the ban breaches EU rules on competition

and that this case should be heard in the EU Court of Justice. And what about this modern slavery

quote? Because it's quite sort of opposed to how we think of football is today.

Yeah, exactly. Well, that comes from Michel Platini, so he is the former head of UEFA,

which is the European governing body of the sport. And he's argued that this TPO is quite opaque

and restricts players' freedom. So he says that players don't really have any choice in where they want to go,

...