UK Edition
Richard Scudamore to fight 'European Super League’ plan
Richard Scudamore, the Premier League executive chairman, has pledged to fight any proposed changes to the rules that would allow the wealthiest English clubs to guarantee Champions League qualification regardless of where they finished in the league.
Speaking at the Premier League headquarters in London on Friday, Scudamore said that Leicester City’s improbable triumph had been a “world story, a human story, bigger than a football story” and was adamant that there would be no change to the top four qualifying for the Champions League.
There have been suggestions in Europe that established clubs want to ring-fence their involvement when Uefa agrees a new Champions League format for the next round of television rights. Executives from Manchester United, Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool are understood to have discussed the format of a potential European Super League with representatives of the American billionaire Stephen Ross in London in March.
Although all involved have denied that a guaranteed Champions League place was on the agenda, there are fears that ultimately that is what owners of the most popular clubs want to see.
Scudamore said that he believed there was no appetite to change the simple system that the top four qualified for the Champions League, with the top three going straight into the group stages. He said: “You know me well enough to know what my position would be. Clearly it’s an open competition in our view. We don’t have play-offs or anything in our league.
“If you land in the first three places in you are in the Champions League and it is as simple as that. The idea you might average the qualification over a number of years just seems completely ridiculous.”
He added: “The reason we don’t have play-offs is we have a pure competition. The winners win and the people who finish bottom get relegated. Harsh though that is, it is pure and simple and everyone understands and that is part of our core values. The reason we don’t need play-offs is that we have a mini-competition within for second, third, fourth, fifth place. There are 10 [clubs] worrying about relegation and 10 trying to get European spots and therefore it doesn’t need any altering.”
Asked how other European leagues concerned about the Premier League’s power given a new three-year TV deal worth £8.3 billion might react, he said: “There is a bit of me that says maybe let the national associations decide. If the Italian association wants, in discussions with Uefa, to work on a [European competition] qualification system for the Italian clubs … we are quite happy with our qualification system in England for our places.
“There are a lot of clubs envious that Leicester have won the league – that’s a given. Is there something structurally fundamental that needs changing about the integrity of the Premier League in order to alter that? I don’t sense that at all.”
Scudamore also said that he would fight any proposal for Champions League games to be played on a Saturday, another option that Uefa are looking at as they try to rejuvenate the format . “It is in nobody’s interests running leagues anywhere in the world that the calendar is altered in that way,” Scudamore said. “These are all things that are being bandied around and they are nowhere near coming to fruition and we would resist and fight and pull out all the stops.”
Over 12 months in which Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini, the presidents of Fifa and Uefa respectively, have both been deposed on corruption charges, Scudamore said that despite the occasional problems, the Premier League had never had the scale of problems experienced by those organisations.
He said: “We have advocated for some time you wouldn’t want to change the way we run the Premier League for the way other organisations are run and I think people have begun to recognise that a bit … the most important thing is the 20 clubs and how solid they have been. We haven’t had the infighting and the corruption – just the inappropriateness.”