by blues-clues » Thu Mar 14, 2013 7:47 pm
What Oliver Kay Wrote today - he seems to be very much of the opinion this is not a hoax.
Hope its ok to post the whole article -just copied it from the free trial Times app on the iphone.
Manchester United will lead the opposition to controversial plans to stage a rival Champions League tournament in the Middle East every two years.
The Times revealed yesterday that Qatar and neighbouring Gulf states are proposing a so-called “Dream Football League” (DFL), in which 24 clubs would be offered staggering sums — up to £175 million each per two-year cycle — to take part in the hope of emulating and ultimately challenging the glamour and the prestige of the Champions League and the Club World Cup.
Contrary to denials and conspiracy theories, several of the clubs under consideration admitted privately yesterday to having been sounded out by intermediaries working on behalf of such a project.
Paris Saint-Germain, owned by the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), are known to be in favour, but, reassuringly for those who consider the proposal to be a nightmarish vision, it has yet to gain traction among European football’s establishment. No English club have indicated any support for the project, with United expressing particular distaste for any proposal that threatens the existing European club competition structure.
Although American-owned clubs such as United and Arsenal have been accused of pursuing revenue at all costs, there is profound concern in both boardrooms about increasingly aggressive moves to change the landscape of European and world football.
There is a fervent desire among clubs such as Arsenal, United and Bayern Munich, who hold sway within the European Club Association (ECA) to fight threats to the existing structure and to the increasingly imaginative schemes being discussed as means of trying to overcome Uefa’s new Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations.
While the DFL concept may appeal to the capitalist tendencies of the Glazer family, who own United, the club’s hierarchy in Manchester — led by David Gill, who will continue to exert strong influence when he stands down as chief executive in June — are vehemently opposed to such plans.
Gill recently stood down from his position on the board of the ECA, to be replaced by Ivan Gazidis, the Arsenal chief executive, as he pursues a place on the Uefa executive committee in an attempt to gain more influence for himself and England in European football’s corridors of power. Gill’s position is heavily pro-establishment, with a strong desire to protect the status quo and in particular a competition structure that Uefa wishes to safeguard.
The establishment position was reflected at last month’s ECA general assembly in Doha, when PSG officials were explicitly warned about the dangers of an aggressive approach not only to expenditure but on strategic issues.
Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, the Bayern and ECA chairman, specifically told the PSG delegation: “What you are doing is not positive for football.”
Rummenigge warned the PSG delegation of the need to realise that self- interest of one or two clubs cannot be allowed to overrun an organisation representing 207 clubs from 53 associations. When an internal survey was held about the future of the Champions League and Europa League, 75 per cent expressed “satisfaction or extreme satisfaction” with the existing format, which figures such as Rummenigge regard as a powerful rebuttal of threats to the club competition structure. While the ECA’s visit to Doha prompted talk that they were “cosying up” to Qatar and its controversial hosting of the 2022 World Cup, the organisation and its leading power-brokers are eager to distance itself from such allegations and in particular from the DFL proposal.
“There were a lot of mixed feelings about going to Doha, even within the ECA,” one source said. “In the end it was decided that it would be sensible to accept the invitation in order to take a closer look and to inspect the conditions on the ground there, so that, if we’re talking about the 2022 World Cup finals, we can do so from a position of knowledge.
“This [the DFL proposal] is consistent with everything the Qataris are trying to do, in terms of what next. There would be real opposition to this. People think that the sums of money being talked about can overcome every problem. In fact, the view of the top clubs would be that this kind of money would exacerbate problems.”
The Qatari FA moved yesterday to distance itself from the DFL project, saying it had “no involvement in any such initiative and has heard nothing to suggest such a concept is genuine”. The Times, having made no mention of the Qatari FA in yesterday’s report, maintains such a project has been discussed in European football circles.
Qatar 2022, for their part, are eager to quell the storm surrounding DFL at a time when their hosting of the tournament is under threat from a Fifa investigation into the bidding process. However, there remains an ambition not only to prove that it can make a success of 2022 but that, by showcasing its climate-control technology, it can persuade the International Olympic Committee to allow it to bid to host Summer Games in future.
