Latest news with #Uefa
The Irish Sun
an hour ago
- Business
- The Irish Sun
Drogheda United's owners can't blame FAI or anyone else for European mess, the responsibility was Trivela's
THE TIMES reported on Tuesday that Liverpool are looking to buy LaLiga outfit Getafe. Manchester City are top of the City Football Group, Chelsea and Strasbourg have the same parent company and then there is Red Bull. 2 Kevin Doherty guided Drogheda United to an unlikely FAI Cup triumph last season 2 Board member Conor Hoey spoke to SunSport this week about the club's dilemma The energy drink group also has a minority stake in Leeds United. And the individual who chairs their largest shareholder is also part of Glasgow Rangers' ownership. Then you have Manchester United minority owner There are reports that Newcastle United's owners will buy it if he sells. There are also owner links between Crystal Palace and Lyon, Brighton and Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, Aston Villa and Vitoria Guimaraes plus PSG and SC Braga. Read More On Irish Football And of course, Last season, Manchester City and Girona, and Manchester United and Nice, were all passed to play in Europe after doing the legal bits necessary to satisfy Uefa. And this year, Nottingham Forest were put in a blind trust by Olympiakos owner Evangelos Marinakis for that same reason before Forest fell short on the pitch. But they did write to Uefa Most read in Football So the worms have long since crawled out of the can when it comes to multi-club ownership and that is not going to change. Just as members made way for rich benefactors, who were replaced by richer benefactors, oligarchs, investment vehicles and wealth funds, football finds a way to find more money. Watch Messi score stunning free-kick as Inter Miami stun Porto 2-1m We can question the pros and cons of them all, but the only truly bad owners are the chancers who leave a club high and dry when the funds run out. When the owners fund the good days, little else matters as James Montague's book 'Engulfed' highlighted in chapters talking to many Newcastle United fans. And it is why Drogheda United members voted 90-1 for their sale to Walsall's owners Trivela in 2023. And while the story of the Drogs since then will centre around Kevin Doherty's management and their players, it was made possible because of Trivela. The Drogs' FAI Cup victory as a part-time club was a fairytale last year. But it was only possible due to Trivela's largesse. Accounts on the club's website show Drogheda made a net loss of €792,848 last season, and total liabilities exceed total assets by €1,042,185. It is why board member Conor Hoey — who led the search for the investment that saw Trivela take over — is sure their expulsion from Europe under multi-club rules is just a blip. He told me this week: 'This changes nothing. Trivela are still the right owner. We won the Cup because of their investment in our players and management. 'Of course we're hugely disappointed, particularly for the players and supporters, but Uefa won't break us.' LOOK INWARDS The club can argue Uefa gave them a raw deal, and cite previous examples where they say clubs were given more time. And one of the three arbitrators at the Court of Arbitration in Sport agreed with the grounds of their appeal. They can also question the FAI on why they did not forward on the relevant rule changes regarding multi-club ownership to Drogheda. Everyone in the league can wonder why no club had their arm twisted to apply for a European licence in case Drogs were expelled. But just as clubs bear responsibility for fielding ineligible players after the FAI compounded clubs' registration mistakes, clubs should not rely on others to hold their hand. And Trivela's first statement on the Drogs in 2023 promised 'to increase investment in the club's front-office operations' before it mentioned football or fans. Club chairperson Ben Boycott said this week when he did list grievances, 'accountability falls on us at DUFC and at Trivela Group'. The problem is not that there was no leeway for Drogheda, but that it was hoped there would be leeway when the issue was spotted. Because while multi-club models are probably here to stay, it is up to clubs to navigate it. After all, Silkeborg's qualification for Europe should not have been a surprise given they had done so twice in the previous three years.
Irish Examiner
3 hours ago
- Sport
- Irish Examiner
As Club World Cup hands out riches, a 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 U21 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 the 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 (€18.7m) if they follow projections and reach the league phase. 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. Read More Kylian Mbappe admitted to hospital with acute gastroenteritis 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 of $12.81m (€11.16m) 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 disturb 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, another 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 discuss it in depth last week. 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 by each player 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 thanks to his 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 £827,000; Vorskla Poltava, struggling in Ukraine, would have received £679,000 (€795,000) for their club's successes; MSK Zilina, trailing behind Slovan Bratislava's Champions League earnings in Slovakia, would have taken £1.3m (€1.5m). 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 (€234m) 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. Guardian
Western Telegraph
17 hours ago
- Politics
- Western Telegraph
MPs grant pubs extra time to open if England or Wales reach Women's Euros semis
Bars will be allowed to sell alcohol until 1am, if either England or Wales – or both – take part in the European Championship semi-finals or finals next month. Policing minister Dame Diana Johnson said venues 'stand to benefit' from the temporary later closing time, pushed back from the usual 11pm cut-off, and Conservative MP Andrew Snowden warned his father might 'disown' him, had his party not backed the Government's proposal. But if neither team manages to reach the final stages, pubs will have to stick to their ordinary licence conditions. England players celebrate during a Uefa Women's Euro 2025 qualifying match earlier in June (PA) The semi-finals take place on July 22 and 23, with the final on July 27. Dame Diana said this year's championship in Switzerland, which kicks off on July 2, was a 'prestigious tournament'. She said a Government order paved the way for a 'temporary extension of licensing hours across England and Wales should either England or Wales or both progress to the semi-finals or the final of the competition'. MPs laughed when she added: 'I have to say, from my limited following of football, it seems like the women's teams have a reputation for doing far better than our male teams.' A Home Office consultation found 87% of respondents backed the proposed extension of licensing hours for the semi-finals, dropping to 84% for the final, Dame Diana told the Commons. Publicans 'stand to benefit from this modest extension which would allow them to accommodate increased demand during these high-profile fixtures', she said, and added: 'I fully accept that the hospitality sector has had a difficult time over the last few years and this is a helpful measure. 'It is right to acknowledge as well that police representatives have expressed some concerns regarding the potential for increased crime and disorder. 'Now, whilst operational decisions on deployment and resourcing are a matter for individual forces, I am confident that appropriate measures will be taken to mitigate any risks, as has happened in similar cases. 'Notably, there have been no significant incidents of large-scale disorder linked to previous licensing extensions, which I think is testament to the professionalism of our police service, to whom we owe our thanks.' The move to extend licensing hours applies only to alcohol, and does not apply to off licences and supermarkets. 'If neither England nor Wales reach the semi-finals, the proposed extension will not apply on July 22 or 23. Similarly, if one or both teams reach the semi-finals but do not progress to the final, normal licensing hours will apply on July 27,' Dame Diana warned. I don't think I would have much choice on this matter, as if I ever stood at this despatch box and opposed more time in the pub to watch football, my dad would probably disown me Conservative MP Andrew Snowden Mr Snowden, the MP for Fylde, said his party was 'delighted to support these temporary licensing changes'. He added: 'To be fair, I don't think I would have much choice on this matter, as if I ever stood at this despatch box and opposed more time in the pub to watch football, my dad would probably disown me.' Mr Snowden told MPs there was 'no reason why we should doubt' that the reigning champions, England, will reach the semi-finals. 'We are the defending champions of the Women's Uefa cup after England's magnificent performance at the 2022 tournament hosted here in the UK at Wembley,' he told MPs. 'The final saw a 2-1 victory, and of course in football, it was made all the sweeter by beating the Germans. 'So this is a fantastic time to support your local as well as your national.' MPs called 'aye' to approve the extension. Ministers can extend licences for events 'of exceptional international, national, or local significance', but must ask for MPs' permission. Labour MP for Wrexham Andrew Ranger has called for a tweak in the law, so that ministers can extend licensing hours without the need for a vote in Parliament. Dame Diana said the Government has supported his Licensing Hours Extension Bill, but added it would not clear both the Commons and the Lords in time for the Women's Euros. She said agreeing to Thursday's order – originally laid on May 15 – without a division reinforced 'the argument that debating such measures may not represent the most effective use of parliamentary time'. England and Wales face each other on July 13, with both home nations in Group D alongside France and the Netherlands. The Lionesses will face France on July 5 when Wales will play the Netherlands. On July 9, England will play the Netherlands while Wales face France. Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate licensing rules.
The Guardian
19 hours 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.
The 42
a day ago
- Business
- The 42
Drogheda debacle has many fathers, but Uefa are more culpable than all
DROGHEDA UNITED' EXCLUSION from Europe is a dispiriting fact not because they didn't play by the rules, but because they did not follow a Uefa-designed loophole at Uefa's behest. It's easy to lose a grip on the story amid its blizzard of finicky detail, so stick with us for a moment. Drogs are part of a multi-club organisation owned by an American investment fund named the Trivela Group, who first moved into football with a purchase of English club Wallsall in 2022. They acquired Drogheda in February last year, and added Danish club Silkeborg to the portfolio in December last year. They also control a club in Togo. Uefa don't allow clubs controlled by the same ownership group to compete in the same competition, citing integrity concerns, and so we could sound the Danger Here klaxon when Silkeborg joined Drogheda in the Conference League qualifiers at the start of June. To ensure both of their clubs could compete, Trivela needed to follow precedent in transferring its ownership of one of the clubs to a blind trust, which would reassure Uefa they would not be dictating sporting matters at both clubs at the same time. This precedent was set last year, when the owners of Man City and Man United were allowed to transfer Girona and Nice respectively into a blind trust, to allow all four clubs compete in their Uefa competitions. They were allowed to do this in June last year, whereas this year Uefa brought the deadline forward to 1 March. Trivela missed the March deadline, and so went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport to argue they should be given dispensation to do the blind trust business this week, in advance of the draw. CAS ruled that Trivela ought to have known the deadline, as it had been properly communicated by Uefa in October last year. Given Drogheda finished lower in their league than Silkeborg, it is they who miss out, and the bigger Danish club are allowed to compete. The story is chiefly a travesty for Kevin Doherty and his players, many of whom will have made career decisions around the expectation that Drogheda would be competing in Europe. The club, meanwhile, have lost out on at least €500,000 in prize money and the league as a whole will now have one club fewer fighting for co-efficient ranking points. (The damage will be somewhat limited by the fact the co-efficient total will be divided by the three competing clubs, rather than four, as was to be the case if Drogheda had been competing.) And, as ever, the fans are probably the biggest losers of all, who have had their European trip taken away from them. If you want to play the blame game, then it's a target rich environment. The FAI insist they flagged concerns with Trivela last November, and while they might have done more to repeat these concerns and urge rival clubs to apply for a European licence in case Drogheda missed out, to turn this into another FAI screw-up story is OTT. Rules cannot be enforced without the principle that those involved have a responsibility to know all of those rules, and if the League of Ireland wants to be taken more seriously, the errors of clubs cannot automatically be pinned on the FAI, just as the Association can't take all the credit for clubs' many recent achievements. No, this is an almighty balls-up by the Trivela Group. They had one club in Europe and bought another presumably with the ambition to qualify for Europe, so they should have known the rules and acted to comply. But take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Advertisement The blind trust business is a legal means of satisfying the obvious sporting integrity issues thrown up by multi-club ownership. These concerns were established ahead of the 1998/99, when two Joe Lewis' owned clubs, Slavia Prague and AEK Athens, qualified for the Uefa Cup. Uefa and then CAS barred the lower-ranked AEK, given the possibility for a conflict of interest were they paired together. CAS pointed to one hypothetical: what if both sides were paired together in a group phase and were incentivised to draw their game? In that instance, the owner would have the power to award the players a bigger bonus for drawing the game than winning. But having acknowledged the many potential issues with multi-club ownership, Uefa did not outlaw it. Instead they found a regulatory means of making it acceptable. The proximity of relationship between Red Bull clubs Leipzig and Salzburg was summed up in 2016 when a Salzburg defender, Andreas Ulmer, accidentally wore a Leipzig shirt during the second half of a Champions League qualification match against FK Liepaja. Uefa initially banned Leipzig when both qualified for the Champions League in 2017, but both clubs were allowed to compete on appeal, once the clubs agreed to limit player trading and Salzburg fiddled about with a few bits and pieces – including their branding and board composition – to the point they could satisfy Uefa that Red Bull were merely sponsors, rather than owners. Multi-club ownership then exploded: a 2022 Uefa report said it had risen by more than 400% across Europe in the space of a decade. Uefa are now trying to sift through the wreckage sprung forth from Pandora's Box. The latest workaround has been the blind trust, piloted by the owners of City and United last year. Both clubs' owners transferred their shares in their secondary clubs, Girona and Nice, to an independent trustee who is overseen by Uefa, while promising not to trade players or share coaching or scouting intel. (City were still allowed to sign Girona star Savinho, who had been on loan the previous season from French club Troyes, whom the City Football Group also own.) Uefa demand that nobody in a multi-club network is in a position to influence the sporting decisions made at more than one club at any one time. That said, the blind trust is a temporary thing, and both Girona and Nice will revert to their old ownership structure on 1 July. So while owners can't in theory exercise control over sporting decisions at two clubs during the season, they are free to do so in advance of that season. While the blind trust complies with Uefa's rules the optics offer a different impression entirely. Evangelos Marinakis, for instance, put his Nottingham Forest shares into a blind trust earlier this year, in order to avoid a potential European conflict with another of his clubs, Olympiakos. He remained a very visible presence during the season run-in, however, infamously storming onto the pitch at the City Ground in May. (Gary Neville, heavily critical of Marinakis' intervention, found himself banned from Forest's stadium for the season's final game.) But Marinakis has satisfied Uefa's rules. Drogheda's owners must take responsibility for their feckless, costly error, though they made one with regard to a rule which ultimately legitimises multi-club ownership. Such is its prevalence now, Uefa can only mitigate against its impacts: it's another malign trend in the sport that moved fast to break things and become too unwieldy to rein in. It is, after all, an easy solution to the original sin of professional football: vast financial inequity. Uefa did initially ban the Red Bull clubs, but their workaround was heavily influenced by the EU's principle of free movement of people, goods, and services. Block a club from the Champions League and a club may successfully argue that Uefa are violating that principle. And were Uefa to lose that, they could lose their right to organise all of European football. This is what the vestigial Super League clubs have argued, with Uefa fighting back by arguing that sport has a special status enshrined within the EU's founding treaty, one that would render moot these anti-competitive arguments. Uefa, though, have been much too slow in finding their voice on this special status, and have been guilty of a terrible paralysis in the face of multi-club owners. Hence they are reduced to enforcing rules like that under which Drogheda have been condemned. It has been a brutal defeat for Drogheda United, but the game as a whole is suffering more than anyone wishes to acknowledge. This is a sport full of rules but missing proper governance and, above all, leadership.
