G14 Disbands: A Victory for Football?
“Victory for football as a whole,” reads the title of UEFA’s triumphalist press release today announcing the elite clubs’ forum the G14 had been disbanded.
Meeting at the Home of FIFA in Zurich, the representatives of the organisations present (cf. list at the end of this media release) agreed on the intention to regulate their future relationship with a number of actions. These are to include the planned evolution of the European Club Forum into the European Club Association (ECA), the formal signature of a memorandum of understanding with UEFA and subsequently the dissolution of the G-14 with the withdrawal of its claims in court. As part of the planned moves, UEFA and FIFA will enter into a series of commitments including financial contributions for player participation in European Championships and World Cups, subject to the approval of their respective bodies.
A new independent club forum, consisting of over 100 clubs from all 53 Uefa member nations, will be formed in its stead. It won’t be controlled by Uefa, but will be recognised by it through a “memorandum of understanding”.
As usual, we mere football fans are not privy to all the details of this, and that’s the fundamental problem with the bizarre claim today’s meeting was somehow a victory for the game as a whole.
The BBC’s Dave Munro illuminated us a little more on the details.
Significantly, the clubs are going to get paid when their players take part in international tournaments. All the details have not yet been sorted out but I understand that it is going to be a daily rate irrespective of whether it is £100,000-a-week or £1,000-a-week.
FIFA boss Sepp Blatter, never one to miss out on the chance to get his name on a press release, chimed in with the absurd hyperbole that “Something very special has happened today. The clubs, which are the basic cells of our game and fundamental to its thriving, are at last to become a part of the pyramidal football organisation.”
I actually thought players and supporters were the basic cells, not the greedy and self-serving list of participants at the meeting, including Blatter himself, his mendacious deputy Jerome Valcke, Manchester United’s David Gill, and interestingly — given they’re not even in the G-14 — Chelsea’s Peter Kenyon.
At the Fanhouse, Dave Warner calls the dissolution of the G-14 a win for Michel Platini. He is, I think, correct in the sense that the result fits his gameplan perfectly: as I’ve written previously, some of his more unlikely suggestions in the negotiations over the Champions League places were clearly pawns he could give up in a future compromise with the G-14 to fulfill his promises to central and eastern European clubs.
Brian at the Run of Play also seems to concur, saying that “this looks like a colossal victory for Blatter and Platini against the power of the big European clubs. The threat of a breakaway superleague appears to have expired, gently, in its sleep, and the lawsuits that the G-14 had arrayed around FIFA will pack up their things and go home.”
While that’s true, I’ve long believed that the superleague threat was a bluff the G-14’s just been using to extract more out of Uefa over the past decade, most of which they’ve now got. There isn’t really much else they need, with the final contentious issue on international compensation settled. The superleague simply isn’t realistic: you don’t walk away from the huge television contracts and packed stadiums the national leagues and the Champions League are already providing unless there’s a deal sitting on the table guaranteeing — literally — trillions of dollars in future revenue to replace it. And there isn’t such a deal on the horizon, as everyone knows there isn’t much interest among football fans in watching the G-14 clubs play each other to death.
The new forum does reflect a reality that the G-14 would have had to expand further anyway (as it already has and had plans to do), though the new forum does reflect there has been a slight powershift, especially given the growing financial power of certain other European teams outside the original core. Yet we can be sure that whilst each of the 53 nations will be represented, it won’t be composed equally: expect the richest leagues, home to most of the G-14 as it stands, to have the most representatives, and thus the most power.
And all the real dealings will continue to go on behind closed doors, the curious fan left to guess at how the fate of football is actually decided. A “Victory for football as a whole” would only come if the fans’ interests or even those of the clubs lower down in the pyramid Blatter mentions were also considered in these deliberations.
Photo credit: Antoon’s Foobar on Flickr
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Great post, Tom, and I agree with you about the threat of the breakaway superleague having always been more or less fictional. I highlighted that aspect of the deal on Run of Play largely out of relief that we wouldn’t have to hear about it any more.
One of the most interesting aspects of this, for me, is the increasing personal influence of Peter Kenyon. Reading between the lines (which is all we can do, unfortunately) it really looks like he outmaneuvered the G-14 by setting Chelsea up as the “big club” representative of all the smaller clubs that the G-14 excluded—which brought a new level of organization to the non-G-14 clubs and contributed, in turn, to the balance of power shifting away from the G-14. Now everyone is saying that Kenyon will play a central role in the new European Club Association. And somehow I always thought that he was kind of an airhead. Go figure.
Will MLS clubs be compensated under this arrangement too?
Brian - that’s an incisive observation about Kenyon’s role in this as I probably underplayed the influence of Chelsea, especially as an example of the “new guard” who came in and bought success, tutted at by the G-14 (as if Man Utd haven’t been buying success for years!) but who they ultimately had to include. I suspect it’s really Abramovich (who still wields power in Russian football too of course) rather than the dullard Kenyon pulling the strings on that.
pjdinho - I don’t think so, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out for the rest of the world.
It’s worth mentioning that Kenyon had an advantage here in that the G-14 did for themselves organisationally at the very start, when they insisted on unanimity; as a result, any attempt to expand the group was blocked by at least one club who didn’t want someone else involved. He knew he was never going to get Chelsea in, and as a result, their continued exclusion played in the hands of UEFA, who could claim that the G-14 were totally self-serving, and couldn’t even claim to represent ‘big clubs’ let alone all clubs. Platini was canny enough to spot this and bring Kenyon into the fold, and I’d have thought the latter would be all to pleased to help. After all, he won’t be at Chelsea forever, and who knows what comes next?
It’s an interesting debate as to what this means though. From one perspective, I’m pleased; the G-14 were self-serving, and have gotten a lot of what they wanted anyway. Tom’s right not to see this as a victory for democracy in any way, but I think we have to view this as a victory of sorts. G-14 were heavily lobbying for years for more power within UEFA, more power in world football and they had been furiously spinning against the increasing involvement of European Union officials in sports policy, which is something UEFA have been spinning equally furiously in favour of.
The proof of the pudding will be in the eating - what will this club forum do, what powers will it have and what views will it take? UEFA have always felt that their policies were pitched at the heart of where most clubs were, against the interests of the biggest clubs against whom medium-to-small clubs were equally as threatened by the G-14. They’ll be hoping the expanded forum will reflect that wider constituency with whom they feel able to make common cause.
I’d not describe it as peace in world football by any stretch though. My inclination is that the G-14 ran its course and the clubs knew it. In essence, what was possible to achieve through G-14 had been achieved, and what they wanted to achieve in future was not going to happen via the group. But the underlying issues will not go away, because those biggest clubs are no more capable of moderation than the scorpion getting a ride from the from across the river can stop stinging the frog. I’d say this was a narrow first-leg victory for the forces of progress, but the second-leg is still all to play for.
Thomas,
Great article. I cannot stand the G-14.
My biggest concern about this development is where the money to pay the clubs is going to come from?
What budget is going to have to be eliminated or cut? Will this affect any of the many charitable programs FIFA runs and supports?
Also, even if the current court cases against FIFA go away, that doesn’t mean there won’t be ones in the future. If a club pays 20 million for a player and then loses the services of that player for 4-6 months because of an injury at a major competition, are they really going to happy with the 100,000.00 per week the club received while the player was involved in the competition?
can you explain article Pitch Invasion?