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?

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.

pjdinho - I don’t think so, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out for the rest of the world.

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.