That’s up from last year, when it received a 1.0 share on ESPN, but the game should have benefited from a move to the FOX network and a shift to Saturday afternoon, American time.  The final rating will come in on Thursday, but it looks certain not to meet the expectations of the Fox hierarchy, as Fox Sports chairman David Hill said he hoped for a rating of 2.0 to 2.5.

Hill explained why:

“What we’ve discovered with Fox Soccer Channel this year and Fox Soccer Plus has been an incredible eye-opener about the way the audience just keeps building,” Hill said. “So it really became a kind of no-brainer for us to say this game deserves a place on the network.”

I don’t think Saturday’s rating will dampen that view, especially if the World Cup proves to be a ratings success on ABC/ESPN, but it’s worth noting the event didn’t achieve a massive audience by itself. How much that was down to the teams involved is open to question.

(By the way: this is the first of the new “Diary” entries, quick links & commentary on news of note – a feature of the new Pitch Invasion. Let me know if you find these posts worthwhile or not).

Richard mentioned this here briefly last Sunday, but ahead of the Super Bowl this Sunday it’s worth pausing for thought to consider that the UEFA European Champions League final in 2009 was watched by more people than the Super Bowl for the first time in 2009; and its popularity is set to continue to rise much faster.

109 million watched Barcelona beat Manchester United last May; 106 million watched the Steelers beat the Cardinals last February.

A report from London-based Futures Sports and Entertainment emphasised both were doing well to grow in an era of media fragmentation:

“While the Super Bowl has secured free-to-air broadcasting deals in a number of important European markets such as the UK, France and Germany, it’s distribution and popularity in the key Asia-Pacific region lags far behind the UEFA Champions League,” said the report.

The report, in its seventh year, is based on official data from national bodies and measures ‘at-home viewing’.

Alavay said the continued growth of the Super Bowl and the Champions League final was particularly impressive in a time of fragmentation in television audiences caused by digitalisation.

“The value of these properties is actually growing disproportionately and in an area of digitalisation they are more than bucking the trend,” he said.

UEFA are clearly looking to build on this by moving the Champions League final to a Saturday from this year, meaning days more concentrated buildup, and also a friendlier timeslot for Asia with no work day following allowing a later night for many more. Significantly, according to ViewerTrack, “In 2004, just 6% of the audience for the Champions League Final came from Asia, but by 2009 this figure had doubled.”

In the same period, from 2004 to 2009, the overall audience for the Champions League has risen a simply staggering 74%.

The value that the event now has to UEFA and the significance of that can hardly be overstated, and is central reason why a breakaway European league is (almost) unthinkable, even with UEFA intending to regulate the sport’s financial excesses more tightly.

Where the Champions League still lags behind the Super Bowl, interestingly, is as a local event: the extravaganza that is Super Bowl week is said to have generated over $500m for the South Florida region in 2008, whereas only $63m was claimed for Rome in 2009 (I couldn’t find a figure for the 2009 Super Bowl; and these numbers should always be taken with a large helping of salt).

The switch to a Saturday may help UEFA with that, but they still have some way to go to match all this. There’s big, and there’s the biggest.

Big Story
It’s not exactly breaking news that from 2012 onwards, UEFA are planning to introduce stringent financial regulation that will not allow clubs making a loss to enter European competition. But the Telegraph does have some interesting details today, and confirms that interest payment on debt will be included. Uefa’s general secretary Gianni Infantino told the Telegraph that:

What we are doing, with the support of all the stakeholders in the game including the major professional clubs, is to try and improve the long-term stability of European club football by encouraging clubs to live within the revenues that they generate. We are concerned, and many of the clubs and owners are concerned, about the sustainability of the game.

We survey more than 650 clubs all over Europe, and found that 50 per cent of those clubs are making losses every year, and 20 per cent of them are making huge losses, spending 120 per cent of their revenue every year. Around one third of the clubs are spending 70 per cent or more of their revenues on wages. Revenues across European football grew by 10 per cent last year, but the salaries of players and coaches have gone up by around 18 per cent. It is clear that if we continue like this it will end up with a spiral of inflation, so we need to bring a more rational and reasonable approach to this crazy game.

14 of the 20 clubs in the Premier League made a loss in 2008, but it appears that even though a few clubs might protest the new regulations, the broader base — as Infantino implied — of clubs in the European Clubs Association accepts the need for some sanity to prevail in financial regulation.  But it will be a major challenge to clubs with severe interest payments eating up any profit they are making.

Worldwide News

• Speaking of which….it looks as if the Glazers’ bond issue at Manchester United has been a success, in financial terms, as the Times reports: “More than 50 low-risk investors, primarily insurers and pension-fund providers, have stumped up the cash at a fixed annual interest rate of 9 per cent.” Unfortunately, as Helen Power explains, this isn’t actually good news for the club or its fans: “The problem for United fans — who have long detested the Glazers for their perceived addiction to debt — is that it is a bad thing to give the family more freedom. The family will also almost certainly take advantage of that new freedom to spend as they wish to pay off some of the £202 million they owe to hedge-fund investors under the club’s payment-in-kind notes. If they do not, the interest rate on that debt will rise from 14.25 per cent to 16.25.” The Telegraph, meanwhile, looks at the latest effort by United fans to save the club from the Glazers, as they seek wealthy backers for a prospective consortium.
• American soccer writer Steve Davis tells us why the fact less American media outlets will be able to send as many journalists to the World Cup this year might actually be a good thing for the quality of the coverage, if not the quantity: less general writers who know nothing about the game will be going, leading to less embarrassing incidents like the writer Davis saw at the last World Cup identifying US defender Jimmy Conrad by the credential around his neck (thanks to William for the tip).

The Sweeper appears every weekday, and once at the weekend. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Big Story
Yesterday’s stunning day of UEFA Champions League action is of course the focus of discussion today, with every game providing talking juicy points for the press.

The British press naturally focused on Liverpool after their home defeat to Lyon. Paul Hayward considers the future of  Rafa Benitez (“Everything that can go wrong is going wrong at the moment”, Rafa said after), and Kevin Gardside says fans are losing faith in the Spaniard, though Henry Winter reminds us how many players Rafa was missing in their defeat to Lyon and Gabrielle Marcotti gives sensible reasons for why Liverpool would be “mad to sack Benitez now”.

An even longer-term crisis is focused on up north in Scotland, as Rangers crushing defeat at home 4-1 to Romania’s FC Unirea has Ewan Murray saying that “The most comprehensive thesaurus in the world would barely contain the words to describe this Rangers performance. The latest evidence that Scottish football may be in terminal decline rather than just suffering a rough spell arrived on another harrowing night in Glasgow.” Rangers boss Walter Smith faced calls for his immediate resignation.

Still, probably the most surprising result of the night came in Spain – Barcelona’s coach Pep Guardiola tried unconvincingly to sound unperturbed by their defeat to Rubin Kazan at Camp Nou. And the last minute goal conceded by Arsenal to AZ Alkmar is picked over by Rob Kelly in the Telegraph, who had seemingly been waiting for a chance to make the obvious conclusion that the current team is not a patch on Wenger’s old “invincibles”.

Worldwide News

• It was also a night of Champions League action in the CONCACAF region, as Columbus went through to the knock-out stage, with DC United awaiting results to see if they will progress and Houston hoping to advance tonight (though that looks less likely). It looks like it could be a better year for MLS in continental action after last year’s debacle, when only one team made it to the quarter-final stage and no-one beyond that.
• Notts County were forced by the Football League’s Fit and Proper Persons Test to reveal to them who owned the club, a process undertaken with much reluctance but finally completed. We still don’t know ourselves who exactly is behind the wall of mirrors, but at least someone in authority does.
• Following the famous beach ball goal against Liverpool, the Guardian trawls through other examples of “outside agents” interfering in the game. My favourite is definitely Bryn the police dog.
• To follow-up on Monday’s item about direct supporter involvement in clubs, Exeter City have announced their Supporters’ Trust has now contributed over £1 million pounds to the club since it was set-up just six years ago. Remarkable.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Big Story

This is a bit rich. We noted yesterday Michel Platini’s announcement that UEFA would demand clubs break even in the soccer business to enter the Champions League by 2010, and according to Platini, a leading instigator of this attempt to level the playing field is none other than that well-known frugal owner, Roman Abramovich.

Platini explained that “It’s mainly the owners that asked us to do something – Roman Abramovich, (AC Milan’s) Silvio Berlusconi, (Inter Milan’s) Massimo Moratti. They do not want to fork out from their pockets any more.”

Platini continued that, “Manchester City can spend £300m if they want to but if they are not breaking even in three years then they cannot play in European competition. I haven’t spoken to Manchester City about this and I don’t remember meeting their owner [Sheikh Mansour], but I’m sure I will. Roman Abramovich is a football person and passionate about the game. He loves football. He has come to me and said that we must do something about this.”

According to reports, Abramovich has been alarmed by the spending of Manchester City, and has been attempting what the Guardian nicely describes as “relative austerity” (because he’s a lot less rich now than he was five years ago). So let me get this straight — Abramovich sent Chelsea into the stratosphere by spending wildly and leading to the inflationary pressures in the European game that he’s now complaining about, and so wants to limit other clubs abilities to wildly outspend him as a consequence?

North America

• America’s lower league system the USL is in new hands, as its sale from Nike to Nu Rock Holdings was confirmed yesterday. Their bid won out over that of Miami FC’s owners Traffic, with the Miami Herald speculating this could mean the end for Miami’s USL team, who lost 9-0 to Carolina on Wednesday night. With another ownership group within USL supposedly having submitted a bid, is NuRock the answer?  The news that Nike/Umbro are staying on as sponsors is certainly a positive point.
• Jennifer Doyle has a piece on “Why I want a feminist, anti-homophobic WPS & a more progressive, anti-nationalist/pro-migrant MLS“ as a response to some discussion of her stance from Dan Loney on BigSoccer. I’m not distilling such a complex argument into a bullet point, so take the time to read it.
• Match Fit USA has a piece on the American company leading Russia’s 2018/2022 World Cup bid, competing with their home nation.
• A supporters match between LA Galaxy and Chivas USA supporters’ groups was cancelled by the Home Depot Center just two days before it was scheduled to take place, the Examiner reports. Chivas’ Union Ultras and the Galaxy’s Angel City Brigade had arranged the match as part of an attempt to improve dialog between the groups. “We basically decided to use open dialog and open access between the groups to avoid the misunderstandings that lead to violence”, said an Union Ultras member. Ironically, Home Depot management reportedly cancelled the match due to a fear of trouble breaking out. Having been involved in supporters’ matches myself, I can say that if this is true, this was a short-sighted move as whilst such matches don’t necesarily lead to friendship, they can promote some mutual respect.

Worldwide

• Tottenham Hotspur announced a new “strategic partnership” with Internacional of Brazil, with a focus on player development. One would think this might prove rather more fruitful in this regard than their other partnership with the San Jose Earthquakes.
• Fifa.com has its Friday World Leagues Preview, noting that the Kashima Antlers are closing in on their third straight title in Japan.
• There’s plenty of analysis on the Champions League group stage draw, with Henry Winter commenting it was friendly to English clubs, but Kevin McCarra noting the fixture congestion ahead for the Big Four.
• Meanwhile, SoccerLens has a good update on the latest in the AFC Champions League as it enters the quarter-final stage in Asia.
• There was plenty of action in the Europa League last night. Aston Villa’s defeat got the most attention, but the biggest shock was probably the demise of Zenit St. Petersburg, winners of the UEFA Cup two years ago, who crashed out to Nacional (Cristiano Ronaldo’s former club, but hardly a heavyweight in Portuguese football).

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Big Story

Those who talk about the inevitability of a breakaway European Super League could see the following number either as proof (imagine how much more there’d be if Man Utd were playing Barcelona every week!) or as repudiation (look at how much money clubs would be walking away from!): this year’s UEFA Champions League is worth a  record $1.55 billion in marketing and television revenues, an impressive 33 percent rise on last year’s figure.

There are plenty of interesting financial tidbits: “Each club is guaranteed a $10.1 million participation fee before play begins in September and will get bonuses based on results. A group stage victory pays $1.14 million, while the final next May is worth an extra $12.8 million to the winner and $7.4 million to the runner-up.” Interestingly, last season the biggest market pool earner was Bayern Munich, who made $30.6 million because they were the only German team to reach the knockout stage.

It’s also reported that UEFA themselves keep $285 million of total revenues and that the newly formed European Club Association “will receive at least $3.6 million.”

Worldwide

• Fifa.com has its usual good weekend preview of action around the world.
• Dinamo Bucharest face sanctions after a pitch invasion led to the abandonment of last night’s Europa League game against Slovan Liberec.
• Carseon Yeung finally formalised his takeover bid for Birmingham City; the minority shareholder has lodged a $135m cash offer for control of the club.
• The Guardian considers six underrated footballers, with John Aldridge topping the list. My vote would have been for Vinny Samways, but I’m weird like that.
• It looks like Portsmouth’s takeover fiasco is finally approaching resolution as well.
• Supporters Direct has a piece on the new “fan card” in Italy, an issue we’ve discussed here before: “The fan card has not been welcomed by people attending Italian stadiums. Live football should be a joy, but in a police regime, it’s disregarded as a welcome opportunity to gain information, marketing opportunities, etc – it’s frustrating for all.”
• Barcelona have reported record revenues but lower profits for the past year.

North America

• There’s a tremendous interview with Oguchi Onyewu at the New York Times Goal blog. Frankly, I can’t remember the last time I read such an interesting Q & A with a player on a top European team. Onyewu covers everything from his gamble in not signing with a club before the Confederations Cup to his nationality and thoughts on racism in European football.
• Steven Cohen apparently announced today would be his last appearance on Sirius Radio’s World Soccer Daily, (hopefully) ending a long, bitter and ugly dispute with Liverpool fans. Cohen certainly brought much of this on himself, but if this is the last I hear of him and the campaign, I’ll be relieved.
• The Examiner reports that the Seattle Sounders have 2,000 people on their season ticket waiting list for 2010. There are MLS clubs who barely have more than 2,000 season ticketholders!
• Speaking of Seattle, an interesting note on the costly penalty miss by Freddy Montero — he wasn’t supposed to take the kick, according to coach Sigi Schmid. “He wasn’t supposed to hit the PK,” Schmid said. “There was a player designated to hit the PK — he needs to stand up and take responsibility for that.”  Oops.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Remember when the Champions League wasn’t called the Champions League, but it was actually for champions and not a bunch of runners-up from Europe’s biggest leagues?  Well, we’ll surely never return to the halycon days of the European Cup, but Ian Plenderleith at When Saturday Comes has a very good piece on the change to the qualification structure this season by Platini & co. at UEFA which has, in a small way, redressed the balance towards national champions.

Platini may not have reversed football’s top-heavy tide, and we will likely never again see Malmo play Nottingham Forest in a European Cup final. But this year’s Champions League reforms carry the mark of the idealist, even if they are a far cry from the Frenchman’s original vision of a level playing field. They come in the form of this week’s Champions League play-offs, which have added another round to the already intricate process of qualifying for what must necessarily be described as the competition’s “lucrative” group phase. This fourth and final pre-league round of ten, two-legged ties is divided into two sections. One for teams who placed second, third or fourth in their domestic leagues, including CL regulars such as Arsenal, Celtic, Lyon, Anderlecht and Sporting Lisbon. And the other section for actual champions.

And so, Sheriff Tiraspol of Moldova play Greek champions Olympiakos Piraeus. Swiss title-holders FC Zurich travel to FK Ventspils of Latvia, FC Copenhagen match up against APOEL Nicosia, Salzburg host Maccabi Haifa, and Levski Sofia face Hungary’s Debrecen. In previous years, most of these sides would have faced the likes of Atletico Madrid or Fiorentina (two more very strong teams in the other half of the draw), and that would likely have been the end of their participation. Champions would be eliminated by non-champions and the wealth from the group phase headed towards the same old major leagues.

Of course, it would be even better if all national champions at least automatically qualified for the group stage and all runners-up had to go through a play-off system to get there. After all, UEFA’s new system also guarantees a large number of champions can’t make it to the group stafe by default, since they’re all playing each other to qualify, but Plenderleith is right that it realistically raises the odds for the likes of a Levski Sofia making it to the group stages in this set-up.

But of course, UEFA would face an unwinnable fight to get back to anything closer to the old European Cup.  Unless they’re willing to see a breakaway of the elite clubs, they must obviously strike a fine balance with the continued pressure towards a closed-shop European Super League from the biggest clubs who never want to run the risk of missing out on lucrative guaranteed group play and their stated desire to spread wealth more widely. Such a need to compromise is why Platini didn’t remove the bizarre continued aberration that Champions League group stage losers still luck into what’s now the Europa League’s knockout round, itself revamped and rebranded to guarantee more revenue to more clubs.

This is a small step, but UEFA should be praised for at least trying to hold back the tide towards a guaranteed Big Club Bonanza every season by ensuring some smaller champions definitely make the group stages and gather some much needed attention and revenue.

Soon, though, the thrill of playing Liverpool or Milan wore off in the virtual world. I don’t even remember what the game was called anymore; Championship Manager (now Football Manager) was a far more addictive long-term game, simply because one could take a small club from the bottom of European football to the summit, just as the Run of Play recently demonstrated with their brilliantly amusing series on Pro Vercelli’s rise to become European champions.

In real life, the excitement of Europe’s top teams taking on each other has gradually gotten less exciting as well with every passing season of the drawn-out Champions League, with more-or-less the same teams playing each other every season, particularly in the past few years.

As you’ll have heard, Real Madrid’s President Florentino Perez said last week that he wants to extend this monotony to ensure no big club (like Milan this year) misses out on the big time: “What we need to work out with UEFA is a European Super League that guarantees all the top teams play each other all the time. That is something that does not happen in the current Champions League.”  Perez is apparently willing to abandon UEFA to get his wish if they object and set-up a break-away “closed-shop” league.

Would the rest of Europe’s elite be interested in following Perez’s dream?  It’s not surprising the Old Firm would back such a move, and it would presumably also suit a few other teams who dominate weaker domestic leagues. Writing in The Times, Matthew Syed argues every English owner has been just waiting for this opportunity as well:

The problem with the status quo — speaking commercially now, and God knows that club bosses see the world in such terms — is simple: Europe’s top teams play against each other too seldom. A Super League replacing the existing European and domestic fixtures would allow Europe’s best teams to play against each other twice a week, providing them with huge additional income.

Why else have American owners piled into the Premier League? Why else do they think they can drive up profits when the Premier League collective bargaining structure is squeezing maximum value from the television rights? Why else are they confident of increasing turnover when match-day and merchandising revenues seem to be maxed out?

Two words resolve an otherwise unresolvable conundrum: “biding” and “time”.

These owners have not said it in so many words, but is it credible that they have not considered the financial potential of a breakaway league operating on the model of the American conferences, where the likes of George Gillett Jr, Tom Hicks and Malcolm Glazer cut their teeth? Could they have failed to factor in the prospect of a group of top European clubs operating a closed shop protecting them not only from irksome competition but opening the door to market restrictions that could transform profitability?

By making it a closed-shop, Syed argues, clubs could finally implement an NFL-style salary cap and PROFIT.

It’s a simple idea, and we can be sure that it’s been studied and considered by the likes of Hicks and Glazer, and there’s no particular reason why non-American owners would be less interested in making more money as well.

Indeed, it was only earlier this year that the European Clubs Association seriously discussed the prospect of a Super League with three divisions and promotion and relegation between them. Given the fierce competition the top 20 European clubs would provide each other, it seems unclear if this would suit the likes of Perez — how could Real Madrid still claim to be the top team in the world if they were playing in the second division?

If not — if it were only a 20 club closed league — how could they implement a salary cap when the rest of the world would still have strong enough clubs and competition to compete financially?  Wouldn’t a billionaire just come along and pay superstars enough to draw them to the new Man City and away from Madrid in the Super League?

In all probability, Perez and the ECA are priming the pressure on UEFA by raising the prospect of an unlikely breakaway to force Platini to reverse course away from opening the Champions League to smaller clubs, as he’s done to some degree, and guarantee more ‘big club’ participation in the lucrative group stages. Maybe Platini will be asked to allow all former winners of the tournament automatic entry?  That would certainly suit Madrid and satisfy Perez. Maybe Scotland will be awarded two automatic places in the group stages instead of one? That would suit the Old Firm, and remove the need for them to back a break-away.

This is all very similar to a decade ago, when Milan led the calls for a breakaway European league as a scare tactic to force UEFA to give the big countries more places in the Champions League. It worked, just as the top English clubs threat to break-away and form their own elite competition twenty years ago forced the F.A. to approve the creation of the Premier League as a more profitable entity for the big clubs. Perez and the ECA are simply playing the same game of high stakes poker with Platini and UEFA to get more of the loot in European football guaranteed to them.

The danger to the principle of the sport is pretty obvious should a breakaway European Super League ever happen, and UEFA has to weigh the consequences if they end up playing a game of chicken with the clubs threatening a breakaway and lost. If it actually ever happened against UEFA’s wishes, it would tear apart world football; FIFA would have to ban players competing in such a renegade European league from international competition, putting the World Cup at risk.

Of course, UEFA knows the big clubs themselves would face intense pressure not to destroy world football for their own greed, and that players would have lucrative sponsorship contracts of their own at stake if they were banned from the World Cup — one imagines Nike and Adidas would hardly be happy if their biggest superstars were not on the biggest stage.

The question is who will blink first.

If UEFA caves and creates some kind of permanent Super League structure, it would all be as depressing for local supporters of big clubs as it would be a final defeat for the dreams of fans of smaller clubs. The still sporadic excitement for Manchester United fans when they take on Barcelona would become routine fixture list fodder. Travel expenses would skyrocket and every last penny drained from supporters to pay for the endeavour in higher ticket prices and new pay TV deals. Atmosphere at games would collapse with less travelling fans every week.

It’s pretty obvious that such a closed league and expanded European fixture list at the expense of the domestic calendar would destroy the entire principle of European football as based primarily on domestic football and  a pyramid to the top, even if this principle is only hanging by a thread on the coattails of Super club hegemony as it is.

If it happens,  I’m certainly not looking forward to the release of the European Super League video game.

And UEFA is soon expected to confirm that more champions from the weaker leagues will enter the competition; cup winners will not; and the big leagues will keep four spots each (some might say this was a slight win for them, as they now have three automatic entries to the group stage; on the other hand, the fourth entrant will now have to navigate an extra qualifying round).

These quotes from UEFA and a G-14 spokesman speak of a grand compromise.

The cup winners’ inclusion was “a minor point and it has been delayed in a spirit of conciliation,” said UEFA spokesman William Gaillard, adding that the issue could be discussed again in three years.

Gaillard said that the main goal of the reorganization — to give more nations a place in Europe’s premier club competition — had been achieved.

“What president Platini had in his program was the widening of the group stage to more champions from middle-sized nations,” Gaillard said.

UEFA’s executive committee is expected to approve the proposal next month.

The G14 group of powerful European clubs is happy that the cup winners won’t be included.

“We always thought it was not a good idea,” G14 general manager Thomas Kurth said. “Now, we see it will not come through. It is fine by us.”

The G-14, the now misnamed grouping of eighteen elite self-selected European clubs, seems likely to extinguish itself soon with a new organisation apparently to be formed. G-14′s General Manager, Thomas Kurth explained to Reuters.

“Let’s be clear this is not an expansion of G14, it is an evolution,” Kurth said, adding that the new group would be called the International Club Organisation.

“If it is formed and it can find a solution to the current problems, then it would make no sense for both G14 and the new group to co-exist,” he said in an interview. “Ideally this will happen some day soon. G14 clubs are the facilitators and are leading the formation of this group but, yes, the clubs may decide there is no more necessity for G14 anymore.”

However, The Digger reports that the postponement of the expansion of the G-14 (announced a couple of months ago) suggests a tacit agreement has been reached with UEFA to resolve their dispute with the dissolution of the G-14 and the formation of a new, broader group approved of by Michel Platini.

The future of the G14 group of major European clubs is in doubt after it emerged that the organisation in its current form is to be disbanded. In a development that could have major repercussions for the balance of power in European football the G14 last night abandoned immediate plans to expand to 40 clubs and cancelled its annual conference, scheduled to take place next week in Brussels. The move came as Peter Kenyon, Chelsea’s chief executive, said he would snub any invitation to join the organisation, preferring to exert influence from within Uefa.

The G14 general manager, Thomas Kurth, said last night that expansion plans had been postponed to allow more clubs to put themselves forward for membership, but the Guardian understands that the move was forced by leading clubs as part of a deal struck with Uefa’s president, Michel Platini, on the Champions League format.

Platini is thought to have backed down on his proposal to have domestic cup winners enter the Champions League and will instead allow national associations to decide whether entrants should come from league or cup competitions. As a result the top three teams in the Premier League will go directly into the group stage and the fourth-placed side will play two qualifying rounds.

In return the clubs will rebrand the G14 as a new, independent and international clubs organisation, pledged to work more closely with Uefa. The G14 approach has been to threaten breakaway competitions and to back litigation by clubs against governing bodies.

Uefa has effectively outflanked the G14 by inviting leading clubs, including Chelsea who are not G14 members, to join the Uefa Strategy Forum

(Note Chelsea’s Peter Kenyon very boldly stated that they would not join the G-14, in the full knowledge its days were numbered anyway, after years of being rebuffed).

Have the G-14 clubs been outflanked, then? To some degree, perhaps. But this is just the latest turn in the power struggle between UEFA and the G-14, and it seems to me the latter are just playing pragmatic politics.

Whilst most of the media speculation focuses on the prospects for a breakaway European Superleague, the G-14 has long existed mainly as an implicit threat to UEFA — watch out, they say, because we can organise together, and if we had to, we could take this further.

UEFA, though, have in the last year or two cleverly turned the tables on them. The European Club Forum, composed of 102 clubs, has been working behind the scenes as a more inclusive European-wide initiative to involve the clubs more, such as in the Professional Football Strategy Council. By asserting European football’s breadth and depth, they’ve effectively called the G-14′s bluff.

The problem the G-14 had is that they could not keep up the breakaway threat forever while UEFA made its moves without either doing something or losing the power of the threat. Breaking away, whilst possible, would be a huge gamble of unprecedented proportions in world sports: never would so much money and prestige have been staked on a venture of unknown dimensions.

Some say we saw something a similar with the formation of the Premiership, but doing that on a national scale (and at a moment of prime television opportunity) is not the same as a European wide effort, with all the implications for the players, UEFA, FIFA, and the television deals across numerous countries.

The spur for the Premiership was all the clubs joining it knew there was a big pot of gold waiting for them in the new league, and they weren’t risking much given the English game was not awash with money then. Is it so obvious that there’s a commensurately larger pot of gold for the prospective members of a European superleague than, say, Man Utd already take home from the Premiership and Champions League?

It would be a $100 billion dollar gamble for the G-14. It may well happen one day, perhaps when there’s a trillion dollar offer from Asian television companies sitting on the table, but the comparison to England in 1991 is not quite apt.

So, knowing they had to shift tactics, the G-14 are doing what smart elites everywhere have always done — they expand their base to share a little of the power and spoils, in return for an acceptance of their hegemony. They weren’t suddenly overcome by a desire for democratic egalitarianism when they announced they’d expand to 40+ clubs Europe-wide a couple of months ago. They needed at least the appearance of support from outside the G-14 to counter Platini’s moves.

Platini continued with his own power play, though. Last month, he laid out his thoughts on the UEFA website.

The current elite of European football is not the same as it was in the early years of the European Champion Clubs’ Cup, nor does it necessarily have to remain unchanged. The European model of sport, with its system of promotion and relegation, aims specifically to prevent the elite from becoming a clique and denying new contenders the possibility of access. Nothing is set in stone: worth has to be constantly proven on the pitch.

This is one of the concerns which underlie the proposal that I put forward in Monaco to the Professional Football Strategy Council with regard to the future of the UEFA club competitions from 2009 onwards. The other key elements forming the basis of my proposal are those I argued for in my presidential campaign – namely, to allow the largest possible number of national associations to be represented in European football’s flagship club competition and to increase the number of domestic champions among the participants. This is because, as its name indicates, the competition is primarily intended for teams which have won titles, and with this in mind I also wish to give domestic cup winners the possibility of taking part.

That proposal, not surprisingly, was strongly opposed by the G-14 — it would make it much harder for those clubs to presume they would always qualify for the Champions League, if one spot were dependent more on the chance of cup competition.

But that proposal actually laid (as I suspect Platini knew) the groundwork neatly for a compromise. Platini’s proposal about the cup winners one he can “give up” in return for the elite accepting more champions from the “lesser nations” into the Champions League, satisfying his own constituency. A new organisation independent of the G-14 can then be formed based on this agreement. The G-14 clubs will be prominently involved — as the richest and most powerful clubs, they will still have the most say. Even Chelsea can join in the fun.

So the G-14 seemingly given up a little of their unilateral power in the process (no more ganging up on Chelsea as an outsider), but in fact, that power was predicated on a bluff that UEFA could always have called and that they weren’t ready for. Now they still get to keep the Champions League largely as it is with a sop to the smaller countries (it looks like the big leagues will keep four having four entrants based on domestic league standings), and can continue to milk the cash cows of that tournament and their domestic leagues without taking the wild risk of breaking away.

So then, who played who exactly?