On Soccer: The decision by a commercial tribunal in Charleroi yesterday to refer the case brought by the town's football club against Fifa to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) may not have come as a great surprise, but there will still be considerable unease at almost every level of the game that the judges in Brussels are again to play a major part in shaping the future of the sport.

While the last such case, brought by Jean Marc Bosman more than a decade ago, resulted in a dramatic shift in the contractual relationship between clubs and their players, this latest dispute may help redefine the financial pecking order at the top of the game at a time when G14 - a group that now consists of 18 major European clubs - have already threatened to form its own super league, a competition that would operate outside of all of the game's current international structures.

The case sent forward to the ECJ centres on a dispute that initially arose between Royal Charleroi and the Moroccan FA when one of the club's players, Abdelmajid Oulmers, tore ankle ligaments during a friendly international game against Burkino Faso.

Many associations, including the FAI, take out insurance that enables them to compensate clubs when their players are injured in these sorts of circumstances but most of the poorer ones do not. The Moroccans fall into the latter category and when they pointed out that they could not, under Fifa statutes, be held liable for damages the club decided to pursue a claim for around €1.2 million (the cost, they say, of not qualifying for European competition) against the international federation. Seeing their opportunity G14 quickly weighed in behind the claim and the organisation has underwritten all of the Belgian club's legal costs.

Initially the organisation made it clear that it wanted its members (the likes of Manchester United, Real Madrid and Milan) to be reimbursed for the wages of players who went on international duty. This caused something of an outcry with even moderately well off associations like our own pointing out that the cost would run to around €6 million per annum. With the FAI turning over perhaps four times that figure, such a change in the rules would have dramatic, though not quite fatal consequences. Budgets, almost certainly, would have to be slashed, and the national team might even become the subject of budgetary constraints with managers obliged to omit the more expensive players for the less important games.

If the rules ever came to be applied outside of Europe, of course, the effects would be even more catastrophic with an entire association like the Ivory Coast, for instance, actually turning over far less in a year than one of its star players like Didier Drogba.

Faced with this reaction G14 sought to rework their position, claiming instead that what thery were after was merely a cut of the big championship pie. The World Cup and European Championships generate enough for everybody, it argued, and their members should get their fair share of the cash raised, primarily from television and marketing rights. Jean Louis Dupont, the lawyer who represented Bosman all those years ago and who is now working for G14, estimates that it would take €860 million to compensate the big clubs for the services of their players over the last decade.

Ironically, if the money was ever to be paid it would almost send players wages spiralling upwards again which would, in turn, mean higher bills for Fifa and Uefa. Hardly surprisingly, the two organisations are fiercely resistive to the idea and their stand has won considerable support from national associations that see themselves as potentially the biggest losers in all of this.

The FAI's chief executive, John Delaney, yesterday expressed his ongoing concern in relation to the case which, if it were to go G14's way, would exacerbate a situation in which Europe's top 20 clubs already control 25 per cent of all football revenues generated across the Continent.

With just 200 or so professionals out of 400,000 registered players, the Irish game, he argues, has a lot to lose if Brussels decides to characterise the game as little more than a multi-billion euro industry. Irish MEP Eoin Ryan, who has been involved with a review by the European Parliament of the game's status, agrees and he questions the claims of G14 representatives that the money can effectively be spared. "The bottom line is that it might be a big cake but it's still finite and if the clubs take a big chunk then there's going to be less for everybody else," he says. "That's fine for 20 clubs but Uefa argue that the money will go on higher wages while Europe's 24 million amateur players and half a million clubs will lose out. It's hard," he concludes, "to entirely disagree."

He suggests that a compromise, possibly involving the introduction of mandatory insurance, probably paid for by the two federations, would be a desirable outcome. A glance at G14's history, however, suggests they have set their sights a good deal higher than that.