UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin is pondering whether clubs with the same owner will continue to be banned from playing the Champions League simultaneously.
Such a decision might have significant ramifications for the takeover of Manchester United. Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani are said to be the two main contenders for the takeover of the Red Devils. But there’s a catch. INEOS already owns OGC Nice while Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani is the chairman of Qatar Islamic Bank, which is raising concerns about links to Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain. The Qatari bid to purchase Manchester United will reportedly not go through Qatari Sports Investment (QSI), who own PSG, however, but through a private foundation called Nine Two. With PSG and Manchester United expected to play the Champions League year in, year out, UEFA may change his stance regarding multi-club ownership.
In an upcoming wide-ranging interview with Gary Neville’s The Overlap, transcribed by The Times, Ceferin said he is considering a rethink of the Champions League multi-club ownership rules. “We are not solely thinking about Manchester United. We’ve had five or six owners of clubs who want to buy another club. We have to see what to do.”
The Slovenian executive says there are two options on the table: keep the ban or lift it, thus allowing two clubs to play in the same competition. Ceferin adds that he is undecided regarding these rules. “We have to speak about these regulations. We shouldn’t just say no to the investments for multi-club ownership, but we have to see what kind of rules we set.”
The UEFA president seems to suggest that no football players or coaches will obey their club’s owner if the latter wants them to lose against another club he’s owning. “If you are the owner of two clubs and they play in the same competition, you can say to one club to lose because you want the other to win”, Ceferin assesses. “But for you, as a player, do you think it’s so easy to do that, to tell a coach to lose the match because the other wants to win?”
GFFN | Bastien Cheval
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