Lausanne (AFP)

After the earthquake of the ephemeral Super League, UEFA meets on Friday to study the case of mutinous clubs who wanted to create their private competition, but also to finally complete its most pressing case, the confirmation of the host cities of the Euro, shaken by the pandemic.

In the space of 48 unbreathable hours, between Sunday evening and Tuesday evening, European football came close to implosion under the threat of the creation by 12 English, Spanish and Italian clubs of their own quasi-closed tournament, before they do not throw in the towel in the face of the scale of the outcry.

Of the multiple reprisals envisaged by UEFA, one could have been discussed as early as Friday: the exclusion of Manchester City, Chelsea and Real Madrid from the Champions League semi-finals which begin next week, claimed Monday evening by the Danish Jesper Moller, member of the executive committee.

But even if Real, whose president Florentino Pérez led the secession attempt, is still being pulled over to capitulate, such a drastic measure is no longer a credible option.

"There is relatively little chance that the matches will not take place," UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin admitted to Slovenian television Pop TV on Wednesday evening.

"The key is that the season has already started. If we cancel the meetings, the television channels will demand compensation," he explained.

- Two strong men -

So what will the "consequences" promised to dissident clubs and their leaders look like in the same interview?

Will they be judicial, disciplinary, sporting?

For the mutineers to regain the fold of UEFA, "we will have to settle what just happened. I can not go into details, we are discussing with our legal department," said Aleksander Ceferin.

The storm has already redistributed power within the European body: exit Andrea Agnelli, boss of Juve and author for months of an incredible double game, who abandoned both the presidency of the European Club Association (ECA) and its seat on the UEFA Executive Committee.

Rewarded for his loyalty, Bayern boss Karl-Heinz Rummenigge on Tuesday nabbed Agnelli's place in the executive branch of the body while another member of the executive committee remained loyal to UEFA, the president of the PSG Nasser Al-Khelaïfi seized the powerful controllers of the ECA on Thursday evening.

It is therefore up to the two leaders to defend the interests of the clubs in the commercial management of the future format of the Champions League by 2024, a radical change adopted on Monday with a group stage transformed into a mini-championship. inspired by chess tournaments.

- Exit Bilbao -

But in the immediate future, it will above all be necessary for UEFA to finally stop the organization of its Euro, already postponed for a year due to the health crisis and supposed to open in less than two months (11 June-11 July ), in twelve cities in twelve different countries.

The requirement of the European body to see each match welcome spectators further complicated the preparation of this atypical tournament, and three cities were still in the hot seat at the start of the week: Bilbao, Dublin and Munich, threatened with losing their matches.

As early as Wednesday evening, the Basque organizers revealed that they had received a letter from UEFA noting the withdrawal from their city.

Faced with this "unilateral" decision, they plan to take the case to court to recover the expenses of 1.2 million euros already incurred.

The Spanish federation (RFEF) will try to repatriate to Seville the four matches scheduled in Bilbao, provided that the Andalusian regional authorities are more conciliatory on the sanitary conditions to admit spectators.

Dublin, which was to host three group E meetings as well as a round of 16, remains for its part committed to fairly strict restrictions and is hardly optimistic about the Euro.

"I think that if they continue to insist on this point (the presence of the public, editor's note), it will be difficult to continue. We are just very careful about it. We just think that in June, it will be too early" Irish Deputy Prime Minister Leo Varadkar told Today FM radio on Wednesday.

Budapest, Saint Petersburg, Baku, Amsterdam, Bucharest, Glasgow, Copenhagen, Rome and London have, for their part, all promised gauges between 25% and 100%, while the mystery remains on the commitments of Munich.

© 2021 AFP