Madrid’s Metropolitano was preparing for Atlético de Madrid’s meeting with Osasuna when the wider strains on elite European football came into focus at the World Football Summit. Miguel Ángel Gil Marín, the club’s chief executive, used his appearance to argue that the calendar needs firmer limits before its demands become unsustainable.
Quick facts
- Miguel Ángel Gil Marín spoke at the World Football Summit before Atlético’s home match against Osasuna.
- He shared the panel with LaLiga corporate general director Javier Gómez and Maheta Molango, head of England’s players’ union.
- Gil Marín wants league appearances capped for individual players, proposing availability for only 31 or 32 of a 38-match season.
- Atlético now generates more than €500 million in revenue and is valued above €2 billion.
- The club has reached the Champions League’s first phase for 14 consecutive seasons under Diego Simeone.
Gil Marín said UEFA and FIFA continue to seek additional fixtures because greater volume brings both income and influence. In his view, the game must find a balance, particularly for the leading clubs carrying the heaviest competitive schedules.
As Atlético’s representative on UEFA’s Executive Committee for European clubs, he said he has repeatedly advanced a specific idea: a maximum number of league matches for each footballer.
Under his proposal, a coach would know that a player could be used in roughly 31 or 32 of the 38 domestic league rounds. The responsibility would then fall on the technical staff to manage selection, recovery and availability within that limit.
A changed industry
The Atlético executive also reflected on the transformation of football administration. He described a sport that once had enormous social importance but was often run with amateur methods, before becoming fully professionalised.
LaLiga’s evolution, he said, has helped professionalise management across Spanish clubs and accelerated the sector’s growth. From there, he argued, each club has tried to develop its own place in the market while retaining its own identity and colours.
For Atlético, that shift has been substantial. Gil Marín said the club’s rise should be a source of pride, while stressing that the work of his own leadership team alone could not have produced current figures without the wider expansion of the game and LaLiga’s regulatory framework.
He put Atlético’s annual turnover at above €500 million, with a valuation now exceeding €2 billion.
Simeone’s European run
Gil Marín identified one sporting constant behind that financial and institutional progress: Atlético’s uninterrupted Champions League record under Diego Simeone.
The club has qualified for the competition’s opening stage in each of the past 14 seasons. Gil Marín called that sequence an achievement of which Atlético can be especially proud, placing the Madrid side among only six clubs to have maintained such a run without interruption.
