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The Guardian
a day ago
- Sport
- The Guardian
As Club World Cup gifts its riches a proper plan is needed for those left behind
While a dozen of Europe's elite clubs were chasing the American dream, 170 of their less garlanded peers gathered for a barbecue next to Lake Geneva. They had converged on Uefa's headquarters to attend the qualifying round draws for next season's continental competitions; Tuesday night was time to get together, perhaps to speed-date representatives of the team you had been paired with or simply to cut loose before a labyrinthine summer spent journeying in search of league-phase football. Borussia Dortmund were slugging out a goalless draw with Fluminense while the meat hit the grills, but 'Club World Cup' is a dirty formulation in Nyon's corridors of power. Any available screens showed action from Uefa's own Under-21 Championship and alternative sources of entertainment roamed the pastel green lawns. A caricature artist did the rounds, stopping at the table occupied by Aleksander Ceferin and putting his pencil to work. The picture for these smaller clubs may be similarly distorted, but the humorous aspect is lacking. Uefa were correct to trumpet the event's symbolism in their pre-draw publicity: a vibrant collage of European football life was present, from the storied names of Red Star Belgrade and Rangers to Iberia 1999 of Georgia and Estonia's Paide Linnameeskond. However, beneath the collegiality it is impossible to escape the sense of a majority being left far behind, with ideas to redress the balance painfully few and largely inadequate. Most of Europe's clubs stand no chance of keeping pace with a top-level juggernaut that has unhitched itself and careered away. Some occupy an untenable half-space, unable to seriously challenge those in the big five leagues while crushing domestic opposition with the money on offer from the Champions League, Europa League or Conference League. Nobody is squarely to blame for trends that owe much to late-stage capitalism and geopolitical forces but there may be a less charitable outlook towards those who fail to act. There is particular concern that the revamped Champions League, for all the triumphalism around its 36-team group format, will have the variety squeezed from it. Nineteen of its slots will be filled by English, German, Spanish and Italian clubs in 2025-26, six from the Premier League alone. For proud institutions such as Malmö, Dynamo Kyiv and Panathinaikos the hopes of tracing a path to one of the seven playoff qualifying berths are achingly remote. European football's top-heaviness is little secret but alarm bells ring louder when consequences begin to rear up lower down. In this season's qualifying rounds only the Armenian club Noah and Pafos, from Cyprus, are debutants in the Champions League. That is the lowest figure for 14 years, according to research carried out for the Union of European Clubs (UEC), and indicates that the monotony felt closer to the summit is becoming a consistent theme domestically. Should that be exacerbated the fear is that, as one figure at a leading club suggests, national leagues in their current form will be living on borrowed time. The example of Serbia is instructive. Red Star, who have won eight consecutive titles, will earn a basic £16m if they follow projections and reach the league phase this summer. If the qualifying rounds proceed as expected their three compatriots in the Europa League and Conference League will fail to get that far. Novi Pazar or Radnicki 1923, their representatives in the latter, would take no more than £1m from that best-case scenario of elimination at the playoff stage. The pattern would only be reinforced. There will always be clubs of wildly varying size but the disparity in funding has never been starker. For Red Star's part, they and their equivalents can only gawp at the bare minimum $12.81m (£9.6m) European sides will receive from appearing at the Club World Cup. In most cases that figure will be multiplied several times over by its conclusion. The clear danger is that three strata are emerging in Europe, separated by financial chasms that have become impossible to mitigate. Solidarity payments, a subject of fierce bargaining annually, are one of Uefa's ways to soften the divide. Clubs absent from European competition receive 7% of the annual £3.7bn revenue from those flagship events, a further 3% being allocated to those eliminated in the qualifying phase. It is certainly well meant, and has increased markedly for the current three-year cycle, but will not unseat the status quo. Creative solutions are needed and it caught the attention last month when the UEC, formed in 2023 to represent non-elite clubs, unveiled its plan for a 'player development reward'. Under that scheme, a further 5% of revenue from club competitions would be redistributed to the teams whose academies developed those competing in them. It has been taken seriously enough for European Leagues to have discuss it in depth last week. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion Any European club not playing in the Champions League proper could benefit. UEC's formula, devised with Transfermarkt, takes into account the on-pitch time each player has spent and the prize money they have helped generate. The Italian fourth-tier club Pavia, where Federico Acerbi came through the ranks, would have earned £275,000 through his playing 670 minutes en route to last month's final with Inter. In 2023-24 nearly 1,500 clubs would have benefited from this kind of payment. Jude Bellingham's success with Real Madrid would have handed Birmingham City £827,000; Vorskla Poltava, struggling in Ukraine, would have received £679,000 for their club's successes; MSK Zilina, trailing behind Slovan Bratislava's Champions League earnings in Slovakia, would have taken £1.3m. At the top end Ajax's remarkable production line, picked off so frequently, would have earned them £4.6m. Neither UEC's plan nor any other, including Uefa's welcome £200m pot for clubs with players at the past two European Championships, will mend things alone. But it would be a step in the right direction, perhaps helping narrow the gap between those two layers under the elite. Football beneath the ultra-privileged minority will only thrive with integrated incentives that reward clubs for their contributions to the ecosystem. Maybe that, even more than the prospect of a Champions League winner from those clubs assembled by the lake, is a pipedream. In greeting the new European season Ceferin rightly hailed the diversity of the scene he oversees; perhaps Uefa's appointed artist could have warned him what happens when, for all anyone's good intentions, a work of beauty is defaced for ever.
BBC News
2 days ago
- Sport
- BBC News
Swifts to play Vaduz and Reds could face Shamrock Rovers
Irish Cup winners Dungannon Swifts will face Liechtenstein side FC Vaduz in their first European fixture in 18 McAree's side enter the Uefa Conference League at the second stage of qualifying, the draw for which the draw took place on the winners of the first qualifying round tie between Irish Premiership European play-off winners Cliftonville and St Joseph's of Gibraltar will face League of Ireland Premier Division side Shamrock Rovers in the second qualifying will take on FC Sheriff Tiraspol of Moldova or FC Prishtina of Kosovo should they defeat Latvian outfit FRK Auda in round Premiership champions Linfield could face familiar opposition in the form of Qarabag if they overcome Shelbourne in the first round of Champions League first leg of that tie will be played on 22 or 23 July, with the Blues or Shels at home, followed by the second leg on 29 or 30 Healy's side lost on away goals to the Azerbaijan side in Europa League qualifying in 2019 despite a famous Shayne Lavery-inspired win at Windsor loser of the Linfield-Shelbourne tie will drop into the Conference League second round and will play the defeated side between FK Zalgiris of Lithuania and Hamrun Spartans of draw Shelbourne in Champions League qualifyingThe ties for the second round of Conference League qualifying are scheduled for Thursday, 24 and Thursday, 31 qualified for Europe by beating Cliftonville on penalties in a dramatic Irish Cup final in have twice played in Europe before, when they lost in the 2006 Intertoto Cup to Keflavik IF in the first round and in qualifying for the 2007-08 Uefa Cup, when they were defeated by Lithuanian side FK Irish Premiership clubs can progress past the second round of qualifying then they are potentially four matches away from replicating Larne's historic run to the League stage of the Conference League last season.
BBC News
2 days ago
- Sport
- BBC News
United to face UNA Strassen - tell us your views
Dundee United mark their return to European football with a Conference League second-round qualifier against UNA Strassen of who finished as runners-up in their domestic league in 2024-25, are playing in Europe for just the second time after losing 5-0 on aggregate to Finnish club KuPS at the same stage last first leg is at Tannadice on 24 July, with the return taking place in Strassen the following fans, we want your thoughts on the draw. Do you fancy your team's chances of progressing? Share your views here.
New York Times
3 days ago
- Sport
- New York Times
Nottingham Forest's Premier League fixtures: Full 2025-26 schedule and key dates
Nottingham Forest kick off their season with a home game against Brentford. The 2025-26 season will see Forest face their first European football in 30 years as their seventh-placed finish qualifies them for the Conference League. They will enter the competition in the playoff phase, which starts in the fourth week of August. Advertisement In 2024-5 they excelled for large parts of the league season, they were third for 12 consecutive games before fading out of the Champions League (and Europa) spots. Their final game comes against Bournemouth at the City Ground. All times in BST/GMT By Daniel Taylor Forest can be reasonably content with an opening schedule of four successive games against London clubs – starting with Brentford at home – and then back-to-back fixtures against two of the promoted teams, Burnley and Sunderland. Equally, Brentford will be reasonably optimistic about visiting the City Ground for their first match without Thomas Frank as manager, having won the corresponding fixture last season and been unbeaten on Trentside since Forest's promotion three years ago. Other points of note: the oddity of playing Everton twice in December, the absence of a traditional Boxing Day or New Year's Day fixture, plus midweek kickoffs against Wolves (twice) and Manchester City. Forest also have to factor in European fixtures these days and it will be noted they have difficult trips to Newcastle United and Bournemouth after the first two fixtures of the Europa Conference League group stages (providing Nuno Espirito Santo's team get through the qualifiers). Expect those Premier League games to be shifted as part of a Thursday-night-Sunday-afternoon schedule. And the run-in? That will feature Bournemouth again (a bogey club in recent years) as the final match of the season. Add in games against Chelsea, Newcastle and Manchester United and it will be a potentially challenging way to end the campaign. The exceptional pre-Club World Cup transfer window opened on June 1 and closed nine days later on June 10. Advertisement The summer window re-opened on June 16, while the cut-off date for the 2024-25 profitability and sustainability rules (PSR) reporting period coming at the end of the month on June 30. The window closes on Monday, September 1, at 11pm BST (6pm ET). The winter transfer window opens on Thursday, January 1, and closes on Monday, February 2. The new Premier League season gets underway on the weekend of August 15-17, a week after the Community Shield on August 8, when league champions Liverpool face FA Cup winners Crystal Palace. The final match round will be played on Sunday, May 24, 2026, when all 10 matches will kick off simultaneously as usual. Premier League clubs will enter the FA Cup at the third round, which begins on Saturday, January 10. The Carabao Cup will begin in mid-August, with Premier League teams not playing in Europe entering in the second round, which starts in the week commencing August 25, and the remaining seven clubs receiving a bye to the third round, which takes place in the weeks commencing September 15 and 22. Playoff round first leg: Thursday, August 21 Playoff round second leg: Thursday, August 28
BBC News
3 days ago
- Sport
- BBC News
British Isles opponents could await United in Conference League
Dundee United return to European football after a two-year absence in Wednesday's Conference League second round qualifying finishing fourth in the Premiership last term, they are looking to reach a group/league phase for the first lost 7-1 on aggregate to AZ Alkmaar in the third round of Conference League qualifying last time, United will be glad they and the Dutch side are both seeded and therefore cannot meet at this is one of the few certainties in the draw, with Jim Goodwin's side having more than 60 potential those, Swedish sides AIK and Hammarby might be ones United would want to of Ireland duo St Patrick's Athletic and Drogheda United, Northern Ireland's Cliftonville and Dungannon Swifts, or Welsh teams Haverfordwest County and Penybont, would be classed as easier opponents.
