The strategy does not address UEFA’s responsibilities under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to prevent, address and remedy human rights abuses committed in its business operations, and instead places human rights solely as a public relations matter.

The Sport & Rights Alliance has on several occasions raised concerns during UEFA’s human rights strategy development process, both around the lack of meaningful engagement with potentially affected stakeholders and dangerous flaws in their approach of not consulting affected groups, including athletes’ unions, LGBT+ people, workers, fans, and journalists. Because the process has not been transparent nor integrated the views of the people most affected by UEFA’s operations, the Sport & Rights Alliance does not consider it to be legitimate and has asked to be removed from the list of organizations taking part.

The global representative of professional football players FIFPRO has not been consulted, nor have any labor unions or workers’ representatives. In the strategy’s “football ecosystem” diagram, it fails to mention workers as part of the key stakeholders.

UEFA is an Advisory Council member of the Centre for Sport & Human Rights and has pledged to implement the Sporting Chance Principles, which include the commitment to give those affected by sport a voice in decision making through meaningful and ongoing engagement.

After pledging to uphold human rights, its new strategy shows UEFA has taken a significant step backwards and is not building on the progress made when including human rights criteria as part of the bidding process for the UEFA 2024 EURO. UEFA has also so far failed to clarify whether human rights criteria will be part of the UEFA EURO 2028 bidding process.

The Sport & Rights Alliance wrote to UEFA on September 7, 2021, October 18, and November 30 to express concerns around the lack of transparency and necessary information needed to have a meaningful consultation process and heard that it was not possible to open the full human rights policies due to timeline constraints.