The 2025 Fifa Club World Cup may or may not have delivered football’s world governing body the financial returns it had projected. It may or may not have provided global streaming partner DAZN with the audiences the platform hoped for. But it unquestionably pushed an issue into the foreground which is set to remain there for the rest of the decade: governance.
One aspect of sporting governance in particular – one of its foundations in terms of democracy and accountability – became a hot topic during and after the Fifa competition: athlete representation. Fifa had added another 63 games to an already groaning calendar and had players performing in temperatures in the mid-30s centigrade, which drew the ire of the global players’ union, Fifpro.
Football is the world’s most popular sport and by far the richest. But its governance is still blighted by fractures, with Uefa vs the breakaway Super League clubs and Fifa vs Fifpro among the most recent and most high profile.
Alex Phillips, the director general of Fifpro, told The Long Game that the model that elite football should be working towards was “co-decision-making power on any major issue affecting professional players”.
By way of example, he pointed to player transfers. “They only exist because of professional players, for when they move from club to club. They are called ‘the regulations on the status and transfer of players’. It’s not just transfers, but status as well. You have a regulation that exists solely because of players and yet the players have no say, unless Fifa chooses to involve players and take into account their views. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. But it’s entirely voluntary and up to Fifa.”
The ideal, he said, would be that no transfer regulations could be approved unless jointly agreed between the player representatives and the employer representatives, which in this case are the leagues, the clubs and, depending on the country, the federations.
Phillips previously held a senior governance role at Uefa, European football’s governing body, and was an adviser to Fifa on governance matters. When asked whether there were virtuous examples of athlete representation in other sports, he pointed to US Olympic sports federations, where the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act requires at least 20 per cent of decision-making bodies to be made up of athletes. Some countries in Europe, such as France, Spain, Italy and Portugal, have similar legal requirements for national football federations, he pointed out.
What real representation looks like
The underlying question, however, is always the same. “Representation is fine, but what type of representation is it? Sometimes it can even be counterproductive. If you are just one voice out of a large number of people, and this allows the sports bodies to say, ‘Well, they are incorporated as part of the decision-making process, they were involved and they were part of it, so they can’t complain afterwards’, then it can actually be counterproductive.”
This point was picked up by Alex Inglot, another sports governance expert, who has worked across several different sports, as well as esports. He told The Long Game: “The main concern with any athlete body is that it’s a fig leaf. The questions are always: What are the powers of this organisation? Can they vote on anything? What is the structure of that vote within that committee? What is that decision’s impact on the actual governance of the sport? Does that committee have the ability to veto something? Do the athletes have a minority, equal or majority vote? It’s one thing to have an athlete body that discusses governance of that body, but what power does it have?”
The Association of Tennis Professionals is sometimes invoked as a model which balances the needs of the organisers and the needs of the athletes. The ATP board is made up of four individuals who represent the interests of the tournaments and four individuals who represent the interests of the players. Those player representatives are elected by a player council which is, in turn, elected by the players. Inglot spent over three-and-a-half years on that board as a player representative. Does it work? The devil is in the detail, he says.
“All board members of the ATP have a primary fiduciary [e.g. trustee] duty to the organisation. Which means they don’t have a primary fiduciary duty to the player population in isolation. On a strict legal reading, they cannot do something which hurts the ATP organisation just because the players want it.”
He said that during his time on the board, 90 to 95 per cent of votes were approved by a majority. “But it was in those five or 10 per cent of votes that there was traditionally a dispute. Usually, that was prize money negotiations. We were arguing blind, because tournaments would not give us access to their financials. That is a chink in the armour that the Professional Tennis Professionals Association (PTPA), the player union, is probing. The PTPA’s position is that there are no representatives on the player board who are acting purely in the interest of the players.”
“The main concern with any athlete body is that it’s a fig leaf”
Alex Inglot
An example to follow?
That perfect balance between the needs of all the stakeholders needed to put on the show still seems something of a mirage, an idea that all aspire to but can’t agree on. In recent years, a new body has emerged which has many admirers within the world of professional sport for its democratic and inclusive structures: the Professional Triathletes Organisation.
When asked why it was cited as a model of good governance, the organisation’s chief executive, Sam Renouf, told The Long Game: “Our governance structure has allowed us to create close strategic alignment between three very important – but in some sports unaligned – stakeholder groups: the professional athletes; the international federation (World Triathlon); and strategic investors (external capital). This alignment has allowed the PTO to very quickly establish a new World Tour product that has already had a game-changing impact on the sport.”
Renouf said the organisation, which organises the T100 Triathlon World Tour, was “co-owned” by its professional triathletes. Further, the athletes had a voice through the PTO’s Athlete Board, which is chaired by PTO Chairman Chris Kermode, and is currently made up of Ruth Astle, Fred Funk, David McNamee, Anne Reischmann, Aaron Royle and Laura Siddall.
Although an advisory body, it can point to concrete achievements in the management of the sport. “The athlete board is especially relevant to our technical process – qualifications, prize money allocations and competition rules, which sit under World Triathlon’s governance. The athletes have also worked on updating the ranking system, moving from a closed-doors proprietary algorithm to one with totally open calculations. The Athlete Board also decided on how the technology’s data is shared between athletes or publicly.”
He also hailed the PTO’s maternity policy as “genuinely sport-leading”. It entitles women to take up to 15 months off, retaining an income throughout pregnancy and up to six months after the baby has arrived.
The PTO is still a relatively young body – the first PTO Tour was launched in 2022 – and has not so far experienced the kind of turbulence some more established sports bodies have. Should the PTO achieve its aim of lifting triathlon out of the “dark ages from a commercial and broadcast perspective” new challenges may yet arise.
“We’ve created close strategic alignment between the professional athletes; the international federation; and strategic investors”
Sam Renouf, CEO at Professional Triathletes Organisation
Leverage, leverage, leverage
There is a view that for all the fine words in governing body mission statements or federation presidential election campaigns, the balance of power in elite sport always comes down to one thing: money.
As Inglot puts it: “Ultimately, it’s about leverage. You can be upset all you want, and you can sabre-rattle all you want, but unless you are willing to create an alternative tournament or lead a boycott, you are struggling to be able to exert the pressure to get the results that you want.”
In sport, all power is ultimately economic power. As Phillips points out: “When power [in football] is ceded by federations it is not to the players, it is to the clubs. Because the clubs are where the economic power is. The clubs have more power now, but they have also helped Uefa increase its power hugely as well. That is why Fifa is trying to now get in on international club football as well.”
He argued that while governing bodies for sport undoubtedly do good things in some areas, they won’t share power with athletes unless they have to.
“With the clubs, it is different because of the immense power they have. Players will always be on the other side of the table to the clubs and the federations, who have much more in common with each other. They have a much greater power. Which is why players have to organise into unions to have a collective voice.”
With the hugely lucrative Fifa World Cup set to take place across North America in June and July 2026, another long hot summer of confrontation about athlete representation seems to be on the cards.
Frank Dunne is editor-at-large at SportBusiness . His specialist areas are European football, regulation, media rights, private equity and new technologies.
