“Better to be naive than a liar”, Aleksander Ceferin settles accounts with the putschists



UEFA boss Aleksander Ceferin. – Richard Juilliart / UEFA / AFP

The big winner in the fight against the twelve secessionist clubs, UEFA boss Aleksander Ceferin spoke again on Wednesday evening. He first said that the semi-finals of the Champions League, whose first legs are scheduled for next week, are not threatened.

“There is relatively little chance that the matches will not take place, but in the future it will be different,” said the Slovenian in a long interview broadcast Wednesday evening by a TV channel from his home country, Pop. TV. “The key is that the season has already started. If we cancel the meetings, the television channels will demand compensation, ”he explained.

“Rebuilding the unity” of European football

The European body had previously said to consider an exclusion from any national and international competition for the twelve dissident clubs at the origin of the Super League, three of which are still in contention in the last four of the current edition of the C1 (Manchester City, Chelsea and Real Madrid).

But since then, the six English clubs concerned have withdrawn, precipitating the failure of this private and almost closed tournament imagined by an oligarchy of big clubs to supplant the historic UEFA Champions League. Real are due to host Chelsea on Tuesday in the semi-finals of the European queen round (9 p.m.), while City will move to the PSG field on Wednesday, a club that has remained loyal to UEFA in this crisis.

Ceferin, who called on Wednesday to “rebuild the unity” of European football, warns however that dissident clubs “will suffer the consequences” of their initiative, which has been publicly disowned by ten of its twelve instigators, except, for the time being , Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.

Ceferin and the plot against UEFA

As regards the British clubs, “we will take into account the fact that they admitted their mistake”. But if the others “want to participate in our competitions, they will have to contact us and we will have to sort out the problems,” Aleksander Ceferin said, referring to ongoing consultations with UEFA’s legal department.

He again blasted “greed”, “so powerful” that it can lead to such a “conspiracy theory”, scaffolded in the midst of discussions on the reform of the Champions League after 2024. “Stupidly, I could not not believe that my daily interlocutors were actually preparing another project behind our back, said Ceferin. I was probably naive, but better to be naive than a liar. »And a poet with that.



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