Gerhard Aigner, who has died aged 80, was a sports administrator who became the general secretary of Uefa, European football’s governing body; courteous but firm, he oversaw the inception of the Champions League, successor to the European Cup, as well as dealing with the fall-out from the Bosman transfer ruling which left players – and consequently their agents – more powerful than ever before.
Gerhard Aigner was Bavarian, born in Regensburg, Germany, on September 1 1943, and was keen on football from an early age, playing for a local amateur side in his teens as well as coaching and refereeing. After leaving school he did various jobs, including spells in England, Spain, and Switzerland, where he turned out for a non-league side, FC Moutier.
In 1969 he was taken on by Uefa, which at that time was based in modest offices in Bern, as head of the refereeing and youth sections, and in 1973 he was put in charge of the competitions section. He became a highly respected figure in the organisation, and in 1988, when Hans Bangerter stepped down, Aigner became Uefa’s fourth general secretary.
The most dramatic event in the evolution of modern European football came a few years into his tenure, with the 1995 Bosman Ruling. The Belgian midfielder Jean-Marc Bosman had sued his old club Standard Liège, the Belgian FA, and Uefa, arguing that Uefa’s rules, which prevented him from leaving his club even though his contract had expired, were a breach of his rights established in the 1957 Treaty of Rome.
The European Court of Justice agreed with him, and at a stroke out-of-contract players became free agents, the Court also ruling that EU clubs could hire as many European players as they liked, putting an end to any idea of quotas.
In 2004, a few months after stepping down as Uefa’s general secretary, Aigner lamented the impact that player power had had on the game since Bosman, and the mistakes Uefa had made in dealing with the issue. “To be perfectly blunt, the introduction of the Bosman ruling was a disaster for sport, and especially for football,” he said. “All of the excesses we know of now and many of the problems in the game come back to the decision.
“I think we could have revised the transfer rules in a coherent way and kept the rule which limits the movement of the players. Sport is going the wrong way due to this decision.”
He also wanted to roll back on players’ free movement across national boundaries, echoing the feelings of millions of football followers when he insisted: “There must be a rule that says the English championship should be played by a majority of English players. It doesn’t make sense to have no English players in an English team. It would help leagues like those in Denmark and Sweden to keep some of their players on board and strengthen their league.”
On the international front, Aigner’s reign saw the expansion of the European Championship finals tournament, from eight in 1992 to 16 in 1996 (it expanded again, to 24 teams, in 2016).
At club level, Aigner’s tenure saw big changes to European competition. Since the 1960s there had been three tournaments: the European Cup, for league champions; the European Cup-Winners’ Cup, for winners of the FA Cup and its equivalents; and the Uefa Cup, a reward for high league placings or for victory in the League Cup and its equivalents.
In 1992 the European Cup, hitherto an exclusively knock-out tournament, gave way to the Champions League, which has an initial group stage, mollifying the bigger clubs, who wanted to guarantee a certain number of lucrative games each season. The Cup-Winners’ Cup was ditched in 1999 and incorporated into the Uefa Cup, which gave way to the Europa League in 2009.
In 1998 the European fat-cat clubs were pushing to convert the Champions League into a stand-alone superleague, cutting off the clubs outside it, but Aigner fought hard and successfully to retain its open-to-all structure.
In 1999 the post of general secretary was relabelled chief executive, and Aigner – who also oversaw the move of the Uefa HQ from Bern to Nyon in 1995 – continued in the role until 2003, when he stepped down in time-honoured fashion to spend more time with his family, to whom he was devoted.
Gerhard Aigner, born September 1 1943, died June 20 2024
