Guardian: UEFA changes rules due to Crystal Palace incident, relaxing multi-club ownership declaration deadline

The Guardian reported that due to the huge controversy last season when Crystal Palace was expelled from the Europa League for violating multi-club ownership rules (MCO), UEFA is planning to amend the relevant rules to avoid similar situations in the future. The core of the new rules is the introduction of a "dual deadline" to give clubs a longer buffer to resolve ownership conflicts.

Last season, Crystal Palace failed to set up a "blind trust" as required by the deadline on March 1 because its shareholder John Texter also owned Lyon (both teams qualified for the Europa League). It was ultimately deprived of the Europa League qualification and its seat was replaced by Nottingham Forest. This may have caused an economic loss of more than 20 million pounds to the club. Although Crystal Palace claimed not to know about the deadline and appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, it was ultimately ruled to be a violation.

According to the proposed new regulations, clubs will still need to report potential MCO issues to UEFA before March 1 of each year, but the final time limit for resolving issues will be relaxed to early June after the end of the season. This means that if it does happen at the end of the season that two clubs owned by the same owner qualify for the same European competition, they will have extra time to resolve the conflict through methods such as setting up blind trusts, an operation method that has been used by Manchester City (with Girona) and Manchester United (with Nice).

This rule adjustment is a response to the multiple MCO controversies over the past summer. In addition to Crystal Palace, clubs in Ireland and Slovakia were also directly expelled from the European competition. UEFA hopes that through this move, while maintaining the fairness of the rules, it can also prevent clubs from suffering heavy losses due to procedural negligence.