UEFA president blasts Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus: They wanted to kill football. I don’t care if they disconnect

Aleksander Čeferin is the president of UEFA and one of the least popular figures in football at the moment. In an interview with Der Spiegel, he let his mouth drop and took a swipe at the Super League’s creators.

For years, fans have been bitching about the UEFA organisation, which they say is corrupt and dishonest. But when the clubs wanted to break away from the organisation in the spring and set up their own Super League, there was a huge hullabaloo.

Twelve clubs wanted to set up a Super League, with Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez taking the brunt of it, publicly stating his reasons for breaking away from UEFA. He has become the arch-enemy of the organisation’s president, Aleksander Čeferin, who will now not miss a single opportunity to take a dig at the experienced businessman.

“Florentino Pérez complains that Real Madrid can only survive with the Super League and then tries to buy Kylian Mbappé for €180 million,” Aleksander Čeferin told Der Spiegel.

9 teams have given up the Superliga, but the three founders of the competition remain. Real Madrid, Juventus and Barcelona have not yet given up on the idea of the Super League, which Cheferin bites hard.

“I don’t care if Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus want to break away from Uefa. These guys are trying to kill football. All three clubs have totally incompetent presidents,” Cheferin fired back.

The efforts against the establishment of the Super League are definitely correct, almost no fan wants to see this competition for the rich. However, President Cheferin should clean up his own act first.

Earlier he said that UEFA was in a major crisis, but at the same time he secretly raised his own salary. Financial fair play is more a piece of paper than a strict rule. Manchester City were initially banned from the Champions League for 2 years, but after a while everything changed to a mere fine, which certainly doesn’t solve anything for the rich sheikhs.

How PSG’s funding is going through without Uefa’s intervention is also a big mystery. Million-dollar paydays, expensive purchases, almost no departures. Barcelona’s lawyers even supplied evidence to Uefa that the Parisian colossus is financially worse off than the Catalans, but UEFA did nothing and let PSG build a billion dollar team.

Now even comes the complete abolition of financial fair-play, instead of which UEFA wants to introduce financial balance. In the event of exceeding financial fair-play, i.e. a club having significantly higher costs than revenues, there will be no sporting punishment but a mere fine.

This will clearly favour rich clubs owned by sheikhs with unlimited budgets, who can thus actually buy as much as they want and just pay a small extra amount.

Source: Marca, Der Spiegel