Only in football’s new post-truth world can a major authority say they oppose something by allowing it. Another line has been crossed, this one creating a lot of fog on the horizon.
So it was on Monday afternoon that an official statement was headlined “Uefaconfirms its opposition to domestic league matches played abroad”, only for that same statement to confirm it is approving decisions from the Spanish and Italian leagues to stage precisely such fixtures.
“Given that the relevant FIFA regulatory framework – currently under review – is not clear and detailed enough, the UEFA Executive Committee has reluctantly taken the decision to approve, on an exceptional basis, the two requests referred to it.”
Even for football, that’s a remarkable piece of passing the buck, spin and utterly empty words. Uefa can talk all they want about “reluctance”, how it’s “regrettable” and that all Uefa national associations “confirmed their commitment to engage with UEFA before submitting any future requests”.
In the long term, none of this means anything.
Leaderships change. Ambitions change. Contexts change. Reluctance can quickly turn to relish, especially when a race starts.
And that race has now started. That’s what Uefa have done here, regardless of what they’re saying about the medium term.
What keeps the football infrastructure in place is legal framework. And now, Uefa have just given every agitator or disruptor a legal precedent.
That is all that matters here. The rest is noise.
One claim from within the football infrastructure was that there was the threat of defeat at the European Court of Justice over this, which could have exploded everything. This is instead just a potential future detonator.
The decision is frankly an astonishing move from a leadership that professes to care about the wider health of the sport, and especially one headed by a trained lawyer.
It’s all the more surprising since Uefa already had a precedent at hand. In 1999, the European Commission ruled the body were absolutely right to block Belgian club Excelsior Mouscron from playing a Uefa Cup home leg in Lille. This now actively works against that.
Step by step, and through other developments like the expanded Champions League, Aleksander Ceferin’s leadership is creating the football world that he took such pride in fighting against through the Super League crisis. This is how change really happens – incrementally, and by stealth.
How can they not see the obvious pitfalls here? Some stakeholders are aghast. Others put it in the context of the game’s new stakeholders, from agencies like Relevant to all of the various greater forces who actively want to change the sport, right up to world leaders. Uefa are under pressure there, and are repeatedly posed difficult questions. That makes institutional support all the more important.
Another force in the opposite direction has been the European Union, who have been increasingly attuned to the governance of football. That makes it al the more surprising that Glenn Micallef, European Commissioner for Sport, can respond to this development by posting that he welcomes “Uefa’s clear stance” and “the clarity being shown” by Ceferin.
It’s hard to see how you can describe any of this as a “clear stance” when Uefa are actively sanctioning something they say they don’t want, while entering into a partnership with an agency – Relevent – who actively created this opportunity by forcing a legal climbdown from Fifa on this exact issue.
That isn’t to criticise Relevent, whose stated ambition is to create new commercial opportunities. They’re open about that.
It is to criticise Uefa, who talk about safeguarding the game while simultaneously appointing an agency diametrically opposite to some of what they are claiming to protect.
That certainly isn’t “clear”, and makes all of this look like a fudge, except for one crucial aspect.
Every future agitator will be able to point to this. A line has been crossed.
