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 the
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, according to 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 and competing project Champions League 2.0 - failed to convince other heavyweights on the continent to join them, including Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund in Germany and PSG in France. As announced on April 18 by the newspaper
L'Equipe
, Nasser Al-Khelaïfi, close to the president of the Uefa Aleksander Ceferin, is still campaigning for his side for the reform project of the Champions League, recorded in recent days and supposed be formalized this 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
Times
), nor Uefa, nor any member of the clubs involved in this project have 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.
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