TV stations won’t break Uefa deals

MADRID television broadcasters won't break their contracts with Uefa and national leagues to join the breakaway European Super League project, the head of Spanish media company Mediapro said yesterday as furious fans also slammed the move.

Jaume Roures, whose company broadcasts matches from Spanish top-flight La Liga and holds the TV licensing rights of the Uefa Champions League in the country, said he believed the new competition would not succeed.

"International TV broadcasters have contracts (with Uefa) until 2024, nobody is going to break those contracts now. The only thing that the current move does is to create unease," Roures said.

"It won't succeed. There is no other way out."

"I think it is more despicable, it is more of a greedy power grab than we ever expected, and they claim that they do it in interest of football," Ronan Evain, executive director of Football Supporters Europe, said of the plan that has been long mooted in some form but only now formally announced.

“What they only really do is endanger the economic model of football and put every single club in Europe in danger.”

A bitter battle for control of the game and its lucrative revenue began with a letter sent by 12 clubs, including English clubs Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur, to Uefa on Sunday in which they said they would take legal steps to protect their interests as they set up the new European Super League.

The rival to Uefa's established elite Champions League competition was condemned by football authorities, politicians and fans.

Roures pushed back against the 12 clubs' statement that having a place guaranteed in the competition every year would help their finances strained by the Covid-19 pandemic.

"They are trying to take the biggest share of the money that is on the market and share it out among 20," Roures said, referring to the Super League's goal of having a 20-team league play each season.

"What is the point of it, to pay the players and the middlemen more? We're not talking about raising the wages of the people who look after the pitch," said Roures, whose firm also manages international broadcasting rights for La Liga.