UEFA’s Champions League revamp is shameless... it’s another version of the ESL and must be stopped

A YEAR ago this week, there was a whiff of revolution in the air.

England’s biggest clubs had decided to urinate over 150 years of football tradition by breaking away to form a European Super League, but such was the rage from behind the barricades that all of them quickly surrendered to the will of the people.

Cue much celebration among the traditionalists who believe in the sanctity of football’s pyramid and PRmanufactured remorse from the mostly foreign owners rocked at the scale of revulsion they had unleashed.

Yet, today that sense of victory over the Premier League’s greedy powerhouses seems embarrassingly hollow.

A year on, Europe’s elite clubs look like getting their own way as the Champions League undergoes a revamp which guarantees them even more revenue and, crucially, two extra guaranteed places should a couple of them have a poor season.

Among the proposals to be decided next month is the notion that if one of England’s so-called ‘Big Six’ finish fifth, or win the FA Cup, they could earn a leg-up into the Champions League. If Aston Villa do the same, they won’t. Despite Villa – unlike half of the breakaway clubs – having won a European Cup.

Last year, UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin (top) called the owners of Europe’s Dirty Dozen “self-serving snakes”, who wanted to “take football away from us,” and vowed never to allow it.

But, for all the hard talk, the Super League didn’t die, it merely suffered a mild heart scare.

As Crystal Palace owner Steve Parish (left) put it after losing the FA Cup semi-final to Chelsea: “I feel UEFA is an organisation that isn’t fit for purpose. It’s all about trying to promise the broadcasters, ‘We’ll get you all the top teams in the Champions League by hook or by crook so you can give us a load of money’.”

How wrong would it feel if Patrick Vieira was to take his fine, young Palace side one step further in a couple of years to an FA Cup final against Manchester United, knowing only one of them was playing for a Champions League place? What if

Nottingham Forest win promotion and in a couple of seasons finish fifth in the top flight, yet are denied a place in a competition they have won twice at the expense of a side like Arsenal who have never won it?

Who would want to lessen the chances of Thomas Frank taking the Brentford fairytale to a wonderland conclusion by trying to stop the Champions League circus pulling up at that bus stop in Hounslow?

Here is a boss who has cajoled a team that hadn’t been in England’s top flight since 1947 to play fearless, entertaining football.

It took them to the brink of a top-10 finish in their first season, convincing Christian Eriksen to join them on their journey. Frank has created a unique bond with his players and the fans, backed by a progressive board whose shrewdness in the transfer market has propelled them through the lower leagues to compete with the elite.

They have a sound strategy and are doing everything right. And no one would bet against that allowing them to be in the fight for European places in a few years’ time.

It would be almost criminal to put a new strategy in place that sought to limit the ambitions of clubs like Brentford.

Because their stories are the essence of why we care about football. Yet that is what UEFA plan to do to placate the clubs they so recently accused of trying to “steal football from us”.

They can rig the amount of money that goes towards the big teams, if they must, but they cannot be allowed to rig the rules and turn the notion of merit on its head.

This shameless antifootball plan needs to be stopped in its tracks.

“It’s all about trying to promise the broadcasters, ‘we’ll get you all the top teams in the Champions League by hook or by crook so you can give us a load of money’”