UEFA chief Aleksander Ceferin insists talk of a breakaway European Super League is ‘fiction’.
A recent Football Leaks investigation revealed 16 European clubs, including Juventus, Milan, Inter and Roma, had been negotiating to form a Super League, but Ceferin assured it was mere fantasy.
“The Super League will not happen. It is in a way a fiction now or a dream,” he told BBC Sport.
UEFA chief Aleksander Ceferin insists talk of a breakaway European Super League is ‘fiction’.
A recent Football Leaks investigation revealed 16 European clubs, including Juventus, Milan, Inter and Roma, had been negotiating to form a Super League, but Ceferin assured it was mere fantasy.
“The Super League will not happen. It is in a way a fiction now or a dream,” he told BBC Sport.
“We have some ideas. All I can say is that any Super League is out of the question. Participation stays. And everybody will have an opportunity to compete in every European competition.
“Unfortunately in the world many times it happens that the rich become richer. I think we are one of the rare organisations in the world that tackles this problem.
“We know that we have to slow the gap [between rich clubs and the rest] because probably it will be hard to stop completely.
“And I’m not sure if we want to have everyone equal without intervention. I think that wouldn’t be the right approach because if you are doing a good job, you’re working a lot, trying to do something, you have to be rewarded for that.
“But ‘know your place’ is not fair to say. You have to compete, you have to have results to qualify for the top competition.
“If you don’t have results it would be a strange competition. You decide it by sport results, it’s the only way.”
“The best platforms can only come through international competitions and that is why increasing participation increasing inclusion it is key to all of us.
“Now the most relevant games are the top of the ladder games. If you look at the Champions League Final in comparison to the Super Bowl it beats it by a factor of 1.5 to 1.
“So the spectators of that game are on a global scale. We have to build on that to make sure we have the resources to allocate throughout Europe to allow every single club, in every single European country, to have a proper international platform.”
Ceferin then reiterated the need for ‘unity’ ahead of meeting the European Commissioner for Sport on Tuesday with ECA chief and Juventus supremo Andrea Agnelli.
“We want to show that our vision of the future of football is, let’s say, similar,” he added.
“It’s not completely the same. We [Uefa and the ECA] have some disagreements from time to time but we firmly believe in the European sports model together.
“We think that the European football can go further only if we stay together, unified. If you want to develop football you have to stay together.
“Europe has problems with unity these days – and football, as one of the biggest powers, should lead this unity. That’s our opinion.”