Interview with Alex Muzio, President of Union Saint-Gilloise: «No fear of Inter. But there’s too much imbalance between clubs: European football needs reform» | OneFootball

Interview by Jacopo Carmassi, Principal Economist at the European Central Bank. This interview was conducted on personal capacity only and does not implicate in any way the European Central Bank nor any other entity to which the author is affiliated.

Alex Muzio is the President of the Belgian football Club Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, founded in 1897 in Saint-Gilles, a municipality of the Brussels area. After taking over the Club in 2018 together with Tony Bloom – Chairman and majority owner of English Premier League club Brighton & Hove Albion – since July 2023 Mr Muzio owns a majority stake (75%) in the Club. Since April 2024 he is also President of the Union of European Clubs, an association aiming to represent the interests of non-elite football Clubs across Europe. In this interview, conducted a few days before the game of Union Saint-Gillloise with Inter on the third matchday of UEFA Champions League, Mr Muzio shares his views about the role of the UEC and several key issues for European football governance and financial ecosystem.

Question. Royale Union Saint-Gilloise will face Inter in the third matchday of UEFA Champions League. Another big night, after the Champions League winning debut in Eindhoven in September and the triumph in the Belgian first league last season, after 90 years. Not to forget that USG was promoted back to first league in 2021, after 48 years, and won the Belgian Cup in 2024, 110 years since last time, and also won the Belgian Super Cup in 2024 for the first time. Can we say that football miracles seem to be your cup of tea?

Answer. Yes, I would say so [smiling], but I am not sure what the next miracle could be, because I don’t think we are likely to win the Champions League any time soon. But, at the same time, we will keep trying to do the best that we can, we will keep pushing forward. If you try and stand still as a football club, that is a problem. You have to keep trying to move forward, as everyone else is doing the same – standing still is not really an option.

Q. Going back to the next Champions League game, but from a financial angle: if I remind you that there is a difference of around € 500 million in the economic size of Inter and USG, considering total revenues, what is your first thought when you think about this financial gap?

A. Excitement is definitely the first thought, as we have earned the right to play with teams with such a massive budget, and with Champions Leagues finalists. We don’t feel overconfident, but we are certainly not intimidated or scared. We don’t feel out of place, we feel we have the right to play, and we play at home. PSV also had a significant higher budget than us as well [USG won 3-1 in Eindhoven on the first Champions League matchday in September]. And we are not going to play any team in the Champions League with a lower budget than ours, or even a budget that gets within 3 or 4 times ours. All the teams will have a significantly higher budget than us, and Inter isn’t even the team with the highest budget that we play, given that we play Bayern Munich. So, I am excited, really, that’s the main thing.

The new Champions League format and the role of the UEC

Q. What do you think of the new format of the UEFA Club Competitions, based on the Swiss model with a 36-team league and each team playing 8 games (6 for Conference League)? Is this new format beneficial for USG?

A. I think for pot 4 teams it is beneficial for your chances to qualify that we now play two pot 4 teams [the 36 teams are divided into 4 pots based on the five-year UEFA Club coefficient and, for Champions League and Europa League, each team plays against two Clubs from each pot]. That’s the big change for a pot 4 team. Before, in the group stage with 4 teams, the pot 4 teams only played pot 1 to pot 3 teams. Now we have, in theory, more chances. Newcastle is one of the strongest teams in the competition, so we got a bit unlucky in the draw as we ended up playing a team that, despite its very high budget and quality, has not played much Europe recently, but that’s an outlier and that’s unusual. Normally, the new system would give us much more of a chance of success, which is exciting for us. I like that we play eight different teams, instead of three, and in general I am very positive about the format change: it has added several positives without too many negatives.

Q. Not only are you President and majority owner of USG, but you are also the President of the Union of European Clubs (UEC), since April 2024. The UEC aims to represent the interests of small and medium Clubs in Europe: would you agree with this definition of the UEC?

A. Yes, I would say so, because we view ourselves as a counterbalance to the new EFC (European Football Clubs) [formerly European Club Association, ECA, up to its rebranding in October 2025], which historically was public about being only for elite teams. Only recently, one team which made it into the ECA Board said they were delighted to join the Board of the ECA because it was the group that represented the interests of elite Clubs, and they were proud to join – this happened just a few months ago. So, it is clear that even though publicly the EFC, as they are called now, has changed to claim they represent all Clubs, the reality of the voting system of the Board, and even of the election of the ECA Chair, is very elite Clubs driven. And it is very difficult to get transparency on their vote and how their processes work, but it is pretty transparent that the elite Clubs have the control and have the power, and they use that. They want to have the vanity of representing all Clubs by putting on lavish parties, inviting celebrities and generally making the CEOs of small and medium Club feel involved, but without any plural power, without any right to change anything. So, as I said, we feel ourselves as a counterbalance to that Club group, and by definition that means small and medium Clubs.

Q. I am sure you daily life at USG is as busy and demanding as it has been successful. Your additional role at the UEC certainly adds a significant amount of work and stress – also considering that you have been building the association from its foundations, together with other key figures at UEC. So, the question is: why did you embark on this mission?

A. The first thing to say is that, while I am of course busy with Union Saint-Gilloise, I have empowered both Philippe Bormans, the CEO, and Chris O’Loughlin, the Sporting Director, to run the Club on a day-to-day basis. I feel it is very important for an owner and a chairman to be very clear to everyone in the structure of a Club about who the day-to-day control is with, and to have clear boundaries and clear lines – because otherwise, in lots of football Clubs you will end up in a situation where someone’s boss has told them how to do something, and then they walk down the corridor, bump into the Chairman and get different guidance – and who do you listen to? This creates confusion. So, while it is true that I am busy, I am not day-to-day organic in the functions of the Club, which does allow more flexibility and more time.

I am of the belief that football is very precious, and that it is not just another business. In other businesses you don´t have the passion and the love that people have for their Clubs. You have to stand up for the things you believe in, at times. I certainly believe that football is stretching out and is becoming very elite driven, in terms of players, in terms of finances. A lot of the time is gone and is not coming back, but we can pull back to make this trend a little bit slower and less dramatic. Ultimately, if you are a fan of football in Bulgaria, for example, Ludogorets has now won 14 titles in a row: you shouldn’t be hoping that your team comes second, you should have ambitions for your Club that are realistic, and as time goes on it is becoming less and less realistic that Club supporters have true dreams that can be fulfilled, and that’s a really bad thing.

Final point: it is October 2025, and if you guessed who will be in the UEFA Champions League quarter-finals Clubs in the 2026/2027 season, you would probably get six or seven teams out of eight, and if you were allowed to guess twelve teams, probably you would get eight out of eight. If you had asked the same question even 10 years ago, it would have been nothing as straightforward as it is today, and 20 years ago the answer would have been “I don’t even know who is going to qualify”. So, the speed of the change is very dramatic, and it needs some counterbalance before it is just gone and broken.

(Photo by Stuart Franklin/Getty Images)

Q. And which are in your view the main drivers behind this trend that you are describing?

A. For the National Associations, from the 15th position in the UEFA ranking down, the situation is fueled by the lack of domestic television rights, the rise of UEFA television rights, the distribution of the funds and the distribution of solidarity payments. At the start of the season, in Serbia for example, Red Star Belgrade, according to various statistical surveys, was expected to qualify for the Champions League, and no other team in Serbia was expected to qualify for group stage at all. That would mean that Red Star Belgrade would have revenues of roughly € 40 million from TV rights, both Serbian/national and UEFA combined, and what comes next is essentially solidarity payments, because there isn’t really a particularly noteworthy Serbian domestic television deal. The graph of money spent and points earned is very well established: If you are earning € 40 million in a year and your rival, the second biggest team, is earning € 1 million, you can see how that would distort the league quite dramatically. And, if you say that National Associations from 25th/30thposition down don’t really get represented in the Champions League: if you play Europa League or Conference League and you compete in one of those domestic leagues, you will receive € 10 million, or € 7 million, and your rivals are receiving zero: given the budget in those countries, you could fund multiple years of being the biggest team in the country with one Europa League league phase appearance.

On top on that, I feel there is a bit more societal element: although this is not my expertise as I am mainly a football guy, whichever industry you look at, the biggest companies seem to be able to scale dramatically more than the others – think for example about the Googles, the Amazons, the Apples. You don’t get small firm manifacturers anymore, and everything has accelerated in that way, and one factor is globalization. The UEC does not necessarily think that everyone believes the same thing as us. But, the reason why the Super League was even a viable conversation is that attention for and attractiveness of the super big Clubs is a long way ahead of the other teams, and they do drive the watching and the money of the UEFA competitions. I think anyone who pretends otherwise is not being fair.

Q. Could you please elaborate further on the point of concentration of interest in the big Clubs?

A. The big change is that TV rights are now obviously so massive in terms of driving the revenues of the teams, plus social media now allow to promote products in a way that 30 years ago was not the case, and this has really accelerated all of the finances towards the biggest teams, because those are the teams people want to be associated with. Before, there was a spirit of solidarity and understanding that in sport it is not the same as in other industries. It would be a real treat if, in football in general, teams realized a bit more that they need each other, that they exist with each other. There is no point in being the best team in the country by a huge, huge margin. That wouldn’t be good for you. People seem to think that this would be good, that winning all the time would be great. I don’t think it is. I know that there are a lot of supporters of football Clubs who feel that way, and that’s their prerogative. I don’t want to say this is about being a good or evil thing, a right or wrong thing, it isn’t. But my perspective on football is much more about competitive solidarity: if Clubs are run well, everyone has a chance, but I am not sure that that’s the reality, and that’s a bit of a shame.

In football, it is supposed to be about community, about balance, it is supposed to be about everyone having a chance to win. But I am also not a communist who wants that everyone gets to win every now and again. But the spirit of solidarity and the spirit of competition have drained a bit. In the US NFL and in the Indian Premier League (IPL) of cricket, and also to a lesser but still noticeable extent in the Premier League in England, those three entities all realized the value of supporting competition: you don’t have a product in the long term if one team is so far ahead of everyone else, or even if two or three teams are so far ahead of everyone else, and you know at the start of the season who is going to win. But in the NFL, for example, you really don’t know who is going to win at the start of the season. In the IPL, when it starts, any team has a good chance of winning. And the Premier League knows this.

For many years, Paris Saint-Germain thought it was the locomotive that would drive the rest of Ligue 1. How has that worked out? They are gone from a € 1 bn planned TV rights to what it looks like around € 180 million in the first year, and just general chaos, because people are not interested in the Ligue 1 product any more, because there aren’t stories that they can enjoy and embrace, because they kind of know who the best team is, and who the next best teams are. You have just segmented the system to the extent that it is not interesting anymore. And I think what the giant super Clubs need to realize is that, in the long term, if this keeps happening people will lose interest to an extent – and by the time that happens, it will be too late.

Q. Is there any other specific element that concerns you?

A. I would like to note the duplicity of the big Clubs in the non-big-four leagues – because it is not big five anymore, as with the issue around the TV rights Ligue 1 can’t be part of “big leagues” anymore. Outside the big four, it is quite clear that the UEFA rights that big Clubs in those other leagues receive are not correspondent to the value that they add to European competitions. Those teams would lobby and bully at the domestic level and say they deserve more, but when it comes to UEFA competitions they turn their face completely 180 degree and seem to ignore the reality of UEFA competitions: because they realize that it’s not them driving 5 billion of TV revenues – that’s Liverpool versus Real Madrid, that’s Paris Saint-Germain versus Barcelona. And so they are being vastly overpaid as they get way more money from UEFA than they generate from the games with the TV figures that they get.