FC Sion takes UEFA dispute to European Commission As anyone in Switzerland knows, Christian Constantin never gives up. With Bosman-like consequences for UEFA & FIFA?
Swiss league relents, punishes FC Sion So Sion got the maximum punishment by the Swiss FA (as demanded by FIFA) and FC Basel gets to play Bayern Munich in the Champions League. The Swiss national teams also get to continue as usual. But all the court cases between Sion (or should I say Christian Constantin) and FIFA, UEFA, and the Swiss FA remain - and now Swiss civil courts are involved separate from the CAS. If the governing bodies acted hasty and didn't do their homework this could have huge repercussions.
In a nutshell, what actually is Sion's case? The accusation against them looks fairly straightforward, so why are they saying they did nothing wrong?
Christian Constantin, Sion's Owner is eccentric and often sees the rules differently than the Swiss FA, UEFA and FIFA. A couple of years ago he attempted to have points deduction from FC Vaduz. His argument was that even they they were from Liechtenstein and had a team full of domestic players, they didn't have enough Swiss Players to meet the league requirements. He also tried to move the team out of Sion to the lake a couple years ago.
I was kind of rooting for FIFA to kick Switzerland out. So, that Switzerland could then reciprocate and kick FIFA out of Switzerland.
Technicalities. #1: Sions latest argument was that 2 half transfer windows are one full transfer window, and since the ban got active in the middle of the summer transfer window '10, they considered the ban over in the middle of last summers transfer window. The basis for this is a case of Roma a couple of years ago, where they won at CAS with a similar argument (however Roma was fined for a year, not 2 transfer windows - because of the Roma case, it was changed to transfer windows instead of a time frame). This was basically the CAS case, they tried to withdraw it again because CAS is supposedly biased (curious, considering that a CAS ruling against UEFA is the basis for this argument, but anyway...) and they appeared to get what they wanted in #2 and #3, but CAS ruled anyway, in december, and against Sion. #2: In addition, they got their new players to sue to get their players licenses in summer, based on the Swiss FA unfairly using their market dominance to forbid the players from work. They were successfull in first instance and got a court order to get their licenses (I'm not quite sure what played into this, as I never saw a complete ruling, but I believe the at that time open case #1 played into this). This ruling was overturned in december, though, allowing the football authorities to ban the newly signed players after all. #3: Their case against UEFA was that at the time of the Celtic games, the players had valid licenses (thanks to #2), so UEFA had no basis to throw them out. They were successfull with this argument in court, but UEFA ignored that. I'm not actually sure what became of this, everyone appears to assume that with #2 being overturned, this case is lost as well, but I'm not quite certain this is true. Obviously, it's a bit late to get Sion back into the competition, but it might be a reason to sue UEFA for damages. #4: Now that the court ruling to allow Sions new players to play (#2) was overturned, a big question is whether it was overturned retroactively. The first reaction of the Swiss FA was not to apply it retroactively and let all their results stand. FIFA wasn't OK with this, though, so now Sion got punished severely. You can expect that Sion (or Christian Constantin) will continue to go to courts until he either won or his club is ruined. I expect the latter to be the case, but the way FIFA and UEFA handle the Swiss courts, I wouldn't bet on it.