Some depressing reading...
The biggest clubs do not just want as much money as they have now, they want more.
Who can blame them: none of them really makes any money.
And that was before COVID-19 struck, which has resulted in elite club after elite club announcing nine-figure losses for last year. The solution to their short and long-term cash worries is more games, particularly against each other, ideally on weekends.
At one point, when this chapter in the eternal saga started in 2019, they also wanted to do away with the inconvenience of qualifying for the Champions League again via their domestic leagues.
That demand and the weekend land grab have been quietly dropped â for now â and UEFA is keen to shake hands with the clubs on a new Champions League format next month. The plan is for the eight groups of four to become a 36-team league in which the clubs play 10 games, five at home, five away, with the top 16 progressing to the knockout rounds. Known as a âSwiss modelâ league, it is widely used in chess.
This move, however, will still upset the domestic leagues, who worry that these extra European games will hoover up scarce media rights money and might just be the start of something, not the end. After all, Swiss model leagues are famously flexible and some chess tournaments have hundreds of players.
Whatâs new?
There is one key difference that explains why FIFA was, this week, so willing to leap to the aid of UEFA, an organisation with whom, in football parlance, it has history.
As the body that sits atop the system, FIFA is always going to have an interest in preserving the status quo. But having watched the Champions League help UEFA become far richer than it is, and European teams dominate the World Cup, FIFA wants a piece of the lucrative club game.
It knows its current offering, the Club World Cup, is only really of interest to fans of the European and South American teams that nearly always contest the final, and even then, the European teamsâ fans do not always care that much.
So, FIFA president Infantino, a former UEFA man, wants to replace that with a four-yearly, 24-team, summer Club World Cup that really would find the best club team in the world and excite fans everywhere. He had hoped to get that started in China this summer. But unfortunately China got something else started in late 2019, scuppering Infantinoâs plans and pretty much everyone elseâs, too.