A Brussels commercial court has ordered VelaFrame Media to give 16 first-division clubs copies of 3,840 match recordings within 30 days, in a ruling that could reopen years of football history before the broadcaster’s scheduled file purge on 15 November. The order, issued on Wednesday, gives clubs access to footage from the 2013-14 season onwards while the legal dispute continues. On Thursday, at a small archive room in Liège, former television executive Dieter Ebermann called it “the first whistle in a match that has lasted years”.
The clubs argued they had paid €4.8 million (about $5.6 million) in production levies over 13 seasons and were entitled to copies, even though VelaFrame held the broadcast rights. The court agreed that the levy gave clubs a right to access the recordings, but did not grant them permission to rebroadcast the footage commercially. VelaFrame must preserve the files while the clubs receive watermarked copies. The broadcaster has 10 days to seek permission to appeal.
The footage clubs could not see
Ebermann, 68, spent three decades directing football broadcasts, arranging camera positions and replay cuts for viewers at home. He says clubs were treated as participants on screen, not custodians of the finished pictures. “We built a machine that could show every angle except the one the clubs needed to keep,” he said in an interview, seated beside a monitor showing a grainy touchline view. “The image belonged to the evening’s broadcast, then it was gone from their hands.”
For Georgijs Staprāns, a former Rocheval Athletic captain, that gap has a face: a 2018 cup semi-final in which he scored the winning goal from a rebound. He remembers the roar and the ball striking the inside of the post, but has never seen a replay. “People send me clips from their phones, blurred and cut off,” he said. “I want to know what happened before the ball came to me.”
Annette A. Gosselin, Rocheval’s archivist, has kept the club’s old programmes and team sheets in labelled boxes, but the match footage was beyond her reach. She said coaches had relied on short clips captured from television for tactical reviews, and the club could not build a proper archive around them. “We have players’ names, dates and results,” she said. “Now, perhaps, we can put the actual match beside them.”
A club can lose a match twice: once on the pitch, and again when its own story is locked away.
Dieter Ebermann, former television executive
A narrow legal victory
Antton Leino, a solicitor advising several clubs, said Wednesday’s decision was an interim order, not a final judgment on who owns the footage. The court found the clubs had a credible claim to access because their payments helped fund production, and said the risk of scheduled deletion made swift action necessary. “They are being given copies, not a licence to sell or broadcast them,” he said. “That distinction will matter in the next round.”
VelaFrame said it would comply with the order while pursuing its legal options, arguing that its contracts gave it control of the recordings. The transfer will involve thousands of files and 9,100 hours of footage, according to figures submitted to the court. Clubs must nominate staff to receive the copies, and can use them for coaching, historical records and private club screenings.
Ebermann expects the first recovered footage to be less polished than the television highlights people remember: camera operators shifting position, players drifting out of frame, the crowd’s noise swallowing the commentary. That, he said, is precisely why the material matters. “The clean version tells you who won,” he said. “The rough version tells you what the club was.”
