European Premier League rumoured

FOOTBALL

BENGALURU: Manchester United and Liverpool are in talks with Europe’s elite clubs to join a new Fifabacked competition that would reshape football’s global landscape, Sky News reported yesterday.

United declined to comment on the report and Liverpool did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Citing unnamed ‘‘football industry’’ sources, Sky said more than 12 teams from Europe’s top five leagues — in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — are in negotiations to become the founding members of the new competition, dubbed the European Premier League, with a provisional start date in 2022.

The report added the financiers are looking to raise a $US6 billion ($NZ9 billion) funding package to kickstart the new tournament.

Sky said Fifa, football’s world governing body, is working on a new format, which is expected to feature 18 teams playing fixtures during the regular European season before a knockout phase. Sky added that neither Fifa nor Uefa had commented on the story.

A Fifa spokesperson declined to comment, while European governing body Uefa, whose blueriband club competition is the Champions League, reiterated its president Aleksander Ceferin’s opposition to any such Super League.

‘‘The principles of solidarity, of promotion, relegation and open leagues are nonnegotiable,’’ a Uefa statement said.

‘‘It is what makes European football work and the Champions League the best sports competition in the world.

‘‘Uefa and the clubs are committed to build on such strength, not to destroy it to create a super league of 10, 12, even 24 clubs, which would inevitably become boring.’’

The idea of a European super league has been regularly floated over the last 20 years, with Uefa always coming out strongly against it.

Uefa is currently working with the European Club Association (ECA), whose members include Europe’s biggest clubs, to redesign the Champions League from 2024 onwards, although no concrete plans have emerged.

In February 2019, Ceferin said there would be no Super League as long as he was president of Uefa and Andrea Agnelli was the head of the European Club Association.

The news follows the leaking of ‘‘Project Big Picture’’, a proposal backed by Manchester United and Liverpool, for radical change of English football that was rejected by a meeting of Premier League clubs last week. — Reuters