Greedy owners must pay price for their treacherous plotting
FOOTBALL has come to a pretty pass when Qatarowned Financial Fair Play flirts Paris Saint-germain are the most honourable club left in the Champions League this season but that is somehow where we find ourselves after this week’s tumultuous events.
Real Madrid, led by president Florentino Perez and the ringleaders in what would have been the football crime of the century, fight on for the dead European Super League like Monty Python’s Black Knight, exposed as rotten to the core.
Meanwhile Manchester City and Chelsea try to rebuild their soiled reputations after jumping off the gravy train when all hell broke loose around them.
UEFA say this week’s Champions League semi-finals will go ahead regardless of the treasonous activities.the mood music is one of burying the hatchet and moving on. But it is frustrating to think that the only consequence for those who attempted to pull off the great game robbery will be acute embarrassment.
There must be a price to pay for the plotters.
Taking away seats of influence at the European Club Association and at the Premier League is all very well but an act of such treachery deserves a far more swingeing response.
It would be tempting, for the sheer karma value of it, to bar the organisations involved from European competition.
To see cartel clubs who have qualified by right for the Champions League lose out to sides that finish below them in the table would carry a princely irony value, given that is precisely what their little closed shop of horrors entailed in reverse.
But a sanction such as that would inadvertently punish those whose opposition forced the collapse of Project Backpocket – the players, managers and supporters who rebelled against the rebellion.
The same applies to a points deduction or relegation. The football staff at these clubs were as much in the dark as to their
overlords’ dark intentions as everyone else. Many spoke out internally and a brave handful did so publicly when the facts emerged.
It seems rough justice for the players to be punished for the wrongdoing above them.
The guilty are the greedy owners, men like the Glazers at Manchester United and Johnw Henry at Liverpool.they are the ones who should face the music and offer up more than corporate apologies.
UEFA have it within their power to hit them.article 11d of UEFA’S regulations offers the catch-all clause of a breach of principles occurring by anyone
‘who brings the sport of football into disrepute’.
Rarely can football have been brought into more widespread disrepute than last week.
A fine of £50million each sounds about right. Given their ‘founding clubs’ stood to gain £3bn from their involvement in the ESL, a few noughts shouldn’t make them blanch. It’s only the cost of a decent striker anyway.
The money – £600m from the dirty dozen all in – should be redistributed around the grassroots game in Europe. Let’s call it a windfall tax to benefit the little man.
The ESL pronouncement trumpeted the trickle-down effect that the pyramid would enjoy from their scheme.well here it is made real.
This is not the time for UEFA to come over all magnanimous in victory. Hypnotised by the bottom line, these self-serving snakes would have happily destroyed the game as we know it in Europe.
And while they are at it, UEFA should take a look at their own actions last week.
It was overshadowed in the ESL mayhem but the governing body’s announcement of the Champions League restructure from 2024-25 contained a promise of two places in the enlarged tournament for sides with the strongest historical records in European competition who miss out on automatic qualification.
It was a blatant olive branch to the big clubs offered at a time when UEFA thought negotiation and compromise had a future.
With the vanquished giants on the naughty step, this needs to be revisited.
If there are two spare places going, hand them out to the national champions of countries who do not currently enjoy automatic qualification rather than as back-door entry points for failed ‘super clubs’.
Any Champions League admission that is not based on merit should be a non-starter.
Europe should be earned on merit, not on name and connections. If this extraordinary week has reinforced anything it is surely that.
FLORENTINO PEREZ
JOHN W HENRY