Uefa is supposed to officially present its Champions League reform project on Monday. – FRANCK FIFE / AFP
Is European football on the verge of imploding? This is the trend in recent hours after information from the Sunday Times in the United Kingdom and New York Times in the United States about the separatist European Super League project. According to these two well-informed media on the subject, at least twelve of the continent’s biggest clubs (including Real and Barça in Spain, Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham in England, Juve, Inter and L ‘AC Milan in Italy) are said to be on the verge of announcing the creation of a European Super League, independent of Uefa and its sacrosanct Champions League.
The timing of the upcoming announcement is not trivial since the Uefa has planned to speak officially on Monday on the upcoming reform of the Champions League from 2024. This announcement, if it takes place, risk of creating the biggest imbroglio – and the word is weak – in the modern history of European football. This Super League would automatically integrate sixteen permanent clubs as well as four other qualified via the national championships. It would bring each of them the trifle of 350 million euros.
PSG excluded from the project, Bayern too
For now, to believe the New York Times, the separatists led by Andrea Agnelli, the president of Juventus and the Association of European Clubs (ECA) – the entity behind this secret project and competitor of the Champions League 2.0 – failed to convince other heavyweights on the continent to join them, notably Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund in Germany and PSG in France. As announced on April 18 by the newspaper The team, Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, close to Uefa President Aleksander Ceferin, is still campaigning for the Champions League reform project, which has been acted on in recent days and is supposed to be formalized on Monday.
Aware of the revolution that is brewing behind its back, the European body tried this weekend to block by all means this potentially devastating project for the balance of European football, going so far as to consider banning separatist clubs to participate in their respective championships as well as in the Champions League next season. For the time being, neither President Agnelli (unreachable in recent hours according to the Sunday Times), neither Uefa, nor any member of the clubs involved in this project agreed to respond to media requests. According to one of our colleagues at RTL, a crisis unit would have been assembled urgently this Sunday at the headquarters of the Uefa to prepare the response.