Gary Lineker has laughed off Todd Boehly's suggestion of an all-star Premier League game between the North and the South.
Boehly suggested the match could be an exhibition of the division's top players from the north vs the best from the south. Such a fixture would see the likes of rivals Manchester United, Manchester City and Liverpool face off against players from Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham - an almost unfathomable concept for supporters of those clubs.
The US tycoon, co-owner of the LA Dodgers baseball team, says it could raise millions for the football pyramid. Boehly, speaking at the Salt conference in the United States, said: “Ultimately, I hope the Premier League takes a little bit of a lesson out of the American sports teams and really start to think about why don’t we do a tournament with the bottom four teams.
"People are talking about why don’t we have more money for the pyramid? MLB did their all star game this year. They made $200m from a Monday and a Tuesday, you could do a North vs South all-star game from the Premier League to fund the pyramid very easily."
In response to Boehly's idea, Lineker sarcastically said on Twitter : "Hey Todd, we already have All-Star games. They’re called internationals."
While it's hard to fault Boehly's enthusiasm or his consideration for the lower leagues, it's clear he would run into immediate difficulties in getting a match of this nature off the ground - least of all from Jurgen Klopp. The Liverpool boss has been incredibly vocal on how elite players are already being run into the ground by the hectic schedule and, along with his fellow top flight managers, would almost certainly be up in arms about lending his star men for a friendly fixture, regardless of its plans to do good.
Klopp practically said as much when he instantly shot down Boehly's idea in the aftermath of Liverpool's 2-1 victory over Ajax in the Champions League on Tuesday. "He [Boehly] doesn’t wait long," Klopp told reporters. "Great. When he finds a date for that, he can call me... Does he want to bring the Harlem Globetrotters as well and let them play against a football team?"
Boehly did stress there are no ongoing talks and when asked about the Super League, he added: "I never say hard nos, I like to keep options alive but it is not something that we are talking about at all. I think the Champions League has a big component of that already. You have the best clubs playing each other every season. There’s already a lot of that. If you win the Champions League, you win over 100m euros. You win the Masters and make a couple of million bucks.
"I think you can do that in the summer [play Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich] more often in the summer and there’s other ways to do that. I think that the passion the fans have for the sport as it is, is so strong then I can’t envisage that changing."
