UEFA PRESIDENT ALEKSANDER Ceferin made an appearance at the annual congress of Football Supporters Europe in Manchester last week, where he continued to bask in the spoils of war.
“Thank you for saving football from ruin just over two years ago”, Ceferin told supporters. “Numerous stakeholders, including Uefa, played a major part in stopping the Super League that a small number of greedy financiers wanted to create. But it was you, the fans, who played the decisive role. You were not just the 12th man; you were the first name on the team sheet for a match that lasted not 90 minutes, but 48 hours. You were the captain and MVP in the match of our lives. You saved football.”
To which fans would have been forgiven by responding, Aleksander…was it for this?
The defeat of the Super League asserted Uefa’s legal and moral right to organise football across Europe, but it is now time to ask for whom, exactly, are they currently running the game?
The last couple of years has clearly shown that it’s not being run for the benefit of supporters, whose safety has been put at risk at a series of Uefa’s highest-profile games. That Uefa have continued to preside over a series of organisational shambles – some of which have escalated into scenes of outright danger to supporters – is unforgivable.
The scale of what could have happened to Liverpool supporters at the 2022 Champions League final in Paris is chilling: the independent review of the events around the final concluded that, “it is remarkable that no one lost their life.”
The events were exacerbated by actions of French police but Uefa bear primary responsibility as the Champions League final is their property and it is they who choose the host. And while Uefa did issue an apology to Liverpool supporters, no senior figures at the organisation have resigned over an event that would have been catastrophic but for the exemplary behaviour of Liverpool’s supporters.
The Uefa president didn’t even personally apologise for what happened in Paris until March of this year, when he sat down with fellow Super League Warrior Gary Neville for an interview on The Overlap. (It was the name of General Secretary Theodore Theodoridis that appeared on the written apologies prior to this.)
Uefa increased engagement with Football Supporters Europe in the wake of the near-disaster in Paris, but this year’s Champions League final in Istanbul again descended to a dangerous farce. There were improvements made in access to the stadium, but Uefa and local organisers could not overcome the original sin of picking the Ataturk Stadium in Istanbul as host. The ground is 25km outside of Istanbul and hadn’t staged an event of equivalent size since the 2005 Champions League final. It was unsuitable 18 years ago and it was unsuitable again in 2023.
Uefa’s solution to insufficient transport links was to set up fan zones by the ground and instruct fans to arrive from 1pm, just the nine hours before kick-off. These locations designed for fans then couldn’t cope with the number of fans present, with queues of 20 minutes for water and an hour for food. These queues were much worse inside the stadium, and that was before a chunk of the ground’s contactless payment systems went down. When local organisers were sent out with crates of water and non-perishable food, they only took cash and price-gouged supporters.
The most dangerous development was after the game, where City fans returned to a designated car park for shuttle buses and found it choked with taxis and private cars. Just as police abandoned their posts after the 2022 final in Paris, there were no Turkish police or stewards in this car park to turn away those who shouldn’t have been parked there. The lighting was poor, the gravel surface was inconsistent and the whole scene was chaotic. There were surges of supporters to board the few buses that managed to get into the car park, as taxis and cars blared horns and tried to dart around supporters. One 80-year-old Manchester City fan had to wait for the very final bus to arrive when the car park was cleared, which was two-and-a-half hours after the game ended. One eyewitness told The 42 that it was fortunate that nobody was hurt or killed amid it all.
Speaking last week, Ceferin acknowledged – but did not apologise for – these problems in Istanbul, and accentuated the successes of the other finals held in Prague, Budapest, and Eindhoven. That finals go off without risking the safety of fans should not be emblems of mitigation or justification – it’s a basic requirement.
Days after the Champions League final, Irish fans faced a frightening crush outside of the OPAP Arena in Athens when trying to get into the Euro 2024 qualifier against Greece. Too many turnstiles were shut which led to a build-up of supporters outside the ground just before kick-off. And with too few stewards in the ground, Irish fans then had to climb over a perspex screen to get to another section of seating to avoid overcrowding. Again it fell upon the supporters themselves to guarantee their own safety. Athens was another dangerous mess, and yet Uefa have picked the same ground to host next year’s Conference League final.
If Uefa really do run the game on behalf of supporters, then the Conference League should be taken off Athens, the upcoming Champions League final should be moved from Wembley – scenes of more absurd disorder at the Euro 2020 final – and all future venues must be picked primarily with fan safety and experience in mind. Everything else – including commercial reasons and politicking – should come after.
There is a separate issue at risk of blowing too. Uefa are reportedly meeting this week to discuss rules governing multi-club ownership, with Ceferin casually telling Gary Neville in March that it may be time for a rethink on the rules around multi-club ownership. “We shouldn’t just say no [to] the investments, and for multi-club ownership”, he told Neville.
Uefa’s rules currently prohibit any club from having “direct influence” on another club in their competitions, which were drawn up in response to a CAS case of 1999, who warned of the potential for collusion between two sides of the same owner were they to meet in a group-stage match. Meanwhile, Uefa’s own benchmarking report this year warned that multi-club models have “the potential to pose a material threat to the integrity of European club competitions.”
Were Uefa to go against this warning and lift the barricades to multi-club ownership, thus normalising sides under the same paymaster competing against each other in competition, it would be a dereliction of duty in protecting basic sporting integrity.
Uefa are never shy in stating their victory over the Super League was in everyone’s best interests – it’s time they started to serve them.