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MANCHESTER, England – Spread jargon, euphemisms and the confusing forest of acronyms, set the sound of claim, counterclaims and strident denial, trace your way through laborious details and intricate minutiae, and a simple truth emerges: the culmination of European football, a moment of calculation is approaching.
Last week 's report that UEFA is studying less a reorganization than a total reset of its crown jewel, the Champions League, is not an administrative history of the format. a competition. The New York Times report on Monday that Manchester City could still be banned from the same tournament is not a story of rule violations, deceptive financial statements or malicious leaks.
Both involve something much broader and, in a way, much easier to understand. This is a battle for control between UEFA – the body that has overseen European football for decades – and the extravagant and rich superclubs in the world, which provide a large part of its revenues.
Both are about power and who can exercise it. And both are about who runs the football – on whose behalf and for whose benefit.
To recap: Last Wednesday, a UEFA document was revealed, which draws a vision of what could become the Champions League, the most glamorous, most lucrative and most exhilarated club competition.
He defined what would be a fundamentally different tournament than the one currently occupying the screens and minds: 24 teams would no longer, according to the proposal, have been forced to qualify for the Champions League through national competitions. They would become, for the most part, a permanent class of Champions League teams, a super-continental league from all angles, but the death knell, according to Richard Scudamore, outgoing Premier League president, moreover of a century of national football.
On Monday, while they were still cleaning up debris left at the Etihad Stadium by supporters celebrating a second consecutive Premier League title, The Times reported that the body had considered information that the club allegedly misled UEFA's financial regulators. the income was to recommend that the city be sanctioned for its transgressions. The penalty could be as severe as a long ban on the Champions League season, the tournament whose trophy is awarded to the group of club owners before all others.
It's easy to get away from such stories. They have an air of remoteness, a whiff of futurology. It is tempting to classify them somewhere between rumors and speculation. A chorus of voices, each offering a different tangent, starts as soon as they appear. The facts are easily lost in flood of comment.
Last week, while the Champions League has never been as spectacular as ever, most major leagues in Europe have voted against the proposed change to the competition. UEFA immediately insisted that this was simply part of a consultation process. Everyone would have something to say. It was just an idea. Nothing has been etched in stone. Panic has decreased. The fury is faded. Nothing has changed, not right now: Tottenham beat Ajax, the Champions League was still good. The world has turned.
On Tuesday, Manchester City reiterated its refusal of any wrongdoing. Since the charges were unveiled on Football Leaks' reporting platform, the club has firmly rejected all accusations that it has deliberately inflated sponsorship deals to comply with the so-called financial fair play rules created by the company. UEFA to manage club expenses.
In a statement describing the charge of financial irregularities as "entirely false", City said it was extremely concerned that the Times had quoted "people close to the case".
According to Manchester City, the club's "good faith" in the independent investigators reporting to UEFA was misplaced, or the procedure was "misinterpreted by individuals anxious to damage the club's reputation and its commercial interests Or both. "UEFA has not commented on the Times article.
Focusing on the existence of leaks, however, misses the point, just like the debate on the validity of financial fair play – if European football needs that somebody say to his owners how to spend his money – the fact, and the dispute over whether the Champions League would be better or worse if it was played on a Saturday, about a week ago.
It is not ridiculous to think that F.F.P. is an inherently anti-competitive measure. It is not absurd to believe that homeowners should be allowed to spend what they want on their toys, and it is not crazy to think that clubs should be able to let their very existence be entertained at the whims of a gambler. benefactor, or that the whole building was built. designed to protect and enshrine the primacy of the established elite. Maybe the current rules are wrong.
The opposite is also true: it makes perfect sense to show that F.F.P. It is a good thing that clubs are obliged to live within their means, that long-established sports and social institutions as vanity-generating projects, soft-power games or reputation-laundering schemes for questionable human rights records are not ideal. Maybe rules are the rules, and clubs should respect them, while lobbying for change, rather than choosing the ones they like.
Similarly, maybe the Champions League would be better if the European giants were played more often. Perhaps it would be in the interest of the match that high-level European matches be played on the weekend and domestic matches midweek. Maybe the handful of Greek, Polish and Belgian teams that do it is a waste of time.
Or maybe not. Maybe the top European clubs – who, after all, had imagined what the Champions League should look like – were strangely, coincidentally, similar to UEFA's idea currently working – may overestimate their own place in the firmament. Maybe changing Champions League is killing the golden goose. Maybe it works as is and it's not necessary to change it.
It is perfectly possible to argue for all the above, but the question of which of them is most convincing – which of them, if any, is correct – is not the most pressing one. It is the fact that these questions must now be asked, which matters most. The importance of the plan to change the Champions League exceeds its potential impact on national tournaments. The possible ban on European competition in Manchester City goes far beyond the Etihad Stadium.
In both cases, a much deeper problem is at stake. These stories, in their hearts, once everything else has been removed – the acronyms, the arguments and everything else – talk about who will run European football, whose the voice has the most weight and who responds to whom.
The realignment of the Champions League to the requirements of the biggest and richest clubs (from 2019 onwards) could be part of the UEFA banner, but it would not be at the request of UEFA. This would suggest that power really belongs to superclubs; that they can shape the competitions that they enter to their advantage; that UEFA is more than a trademark, a stamp, an administrator, a commission of licenses.
If UEFA did not listen to the recommendations of its own investigators – if the prohibition for City was the sanction sought – this would prove that FFP, in turn, is actually finished, that the l & # 39; rising elite of Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, supported by Abu Dhabi and Qatar, were right to flout the rules; that the clubs that built their business models around the new reality were stupid; Aleksander Ceferin, president of UEFA elected by a consortium of associations from Central and Eastern Europe, not being part of the five major leagues, could not resist the pressure exerted by the big money and the old elite; that in the end, UEFA has not taken into account its own investigators and that it might or might not apply its own rules.
It's clarity; all the rest is fug.
Maybe all this is for the best. Perhaps it would be better for UEFA to no longer be the ultimate source of power in European football. Maybe it 's time to accept that what is good for the Premier League, or P.S.G., is not the same as for Bulgaria and the Plovdiv Lokomotiv. Maybe the era of big churches and consensus is over. Maybe it's time to free the smaller countries, even stop pretending to share their wealth.
Or maybe not. Perhaps entrusting the control of the game to a super club cartel or allowing nation states to manage their teams according to their uncontrolled desires may harm the right to everyone outside this little cabal.
Maybe the game should be run for the elite. Maybe the game should be running for everyone. Anyway, we are approaching a crossroads. The direction we will finally follow will tell us more than the number of matches in the Champions League played this weekend or if Manchester City will be on the program. This will tell us where precisely the power lies.
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