England and Germany ‘will block European Super League’
Combined opposition from the Premier League and Bundesliga will block the plans developed by the European Club Association for a new “super league” in 2024, the German Football League president has said.
Speaking as world football’s associations and confederations gathered for Wednesday’s Fifa congress in Paris, Reinhard Rauball, who is also president of Borussia Dortmund and vicepresident of the German Football Association, said that the ECA proposals could “destroy” national leagues. He did acknowledge, however, that some reform may be needed to the Champions League format when the current agreed football calendar concludes in 2024.
Within Uefa there is widespread satisfaction with the Champions League’s popularity and commercial success – the president, Aleksander Ceferin, said there had been 900,000 applications for final tickets – but widely held concerns at the automatic qualification of four clubs from Europe’s top four leagues, and at the financial dominance of the Premier League.
The Premier League and Bundesliga have made public statements opposing the ECA plans, and David Gill, the Football Association’s representative on the Uefa executive committee, is understood to have expressed serious reservations within Uefa. The plans – principally worked up by the ECA, whose president, the Juventus president Andrea Agnelli, called for an expansion of the Champions League last year – are for more group stage matches by having four groups of eight clubs, and a system of promotion and relegation with the Europa League which would leave 24 clubs remaining in the Champions League at the end of each season.
“I am the president of the German league and president of Borussia Dortmund; our league, the Bundesliga, decided 100% that we don’t go this way with the ECA,” Rauball said. “David Gill thinks in the same way, the German and British leagues are opposing it and I don’t think it is possible we will find a solution without Germany and without England.”
Rauball said of the ECA proposals, which were presented by Uefa to the European Leagues organisation this month and met outspoken opposition: “This is a typical American kind of competition, a kind of closed shop. In Europe we have a traditional football pyramid, and in Germany we have the [Bundesliga] league with the highest attendances [in Europe], more than 42,000 average, and that has been developed step by step. So we don’t want to destroy it with one decision.
“We have to make clear that the national league is most important. If you make a pyramid like the ECA, we would destroy all the clubs and that is what is dangerous. We are traditionalists and we want that this is the future of football as well.”
The new Champions League proposals were also condemned by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, after a meeting with the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, in advance of the Women’s World Cup which kicks off in France on Friday. The president of the France Football Federation, Noël Le Graët, has expressed firm opposition. “I fully support president Le Graët to go against the reform that is planned at Uefa,” Macron said.
The ECA, having met such widespread opposition to its plans – which the ECA has not yet publicly confirmed, issuing only a set of “principles” – is holding a special general assembly of member clubs in Malta on Thursday or Friday this week to further discuss them.
Rauball said of the current format that he agreed with Edwin van der Sar, the Ajax chief executive, that it is wrong for Ajax, despite their splendid run to the Champions League semi-finals this season, to have to start in the qualifying rounds next season.
“People are saying: ‘Let’s take the problem and cool it down,’” he said. “Let’s first discuss and perhaps we find a [compromise], and after that we will decide it, step by step.”