Aleksander Ceferin has claimed that Manchester United and Liverpool were the English ringleaders behind the ill-fated European Super League proposal in 2021, with the UEFA president saying that Manchester City and Chelsea were not as committed to joining the controversial breakaway tournament.
Speaking to Gary Neville on The Overlap, Ceferin said that he “lost it a bit” with a top official at an unnamed Premier League club that was part of the scheme to form a so-called Super League. The Slovenian also claimed that he is not concerned about the financial strength of the Premier League compared to rival European top flights amid fears of competitive imbalance.
While he does not believe a Super League can succeed without English clubs, Ceferin told Neville: “As much as I know, unfortunately your club’s [United’s] owners were very much involved and Liverpool as well. I think that those two were from the English side the most involved [in the Super League]. The last to join were Chelsea and Manchester City. I’m not sure about Tottenham and Arsenal.
“When I arrived in Switzerland, I got a phone call from one of the English clubs saying that we’ll have to join this project. They didn’t like it but didn’t want to be the only ones out. Two clubs were hesitating in England very much, they said they wanted to stay friends with us, our friends from within.
"Both Chelsea and Manchester City were hesitant from the beginning, and it was one of these teams that called me.”
“I had a phone call from one of the English clubs, I will not say which. I lost it a bit and said, ‘You go to hell. From tomorrow, you are my enemies. I don’t want to speak to you any more’. It was tough.”
In terms of Premier League clubs having financial strength that most of Europe cannot rival, he added: “I am not worried about that. I think the Premier League is doing a good job and the other leagues should do a better job.”
Ceferin also revealed that UEFA might change its rules on multi-club ownership - a move that may remove the biggest hurdle to a Qatari takeover of Manchester United.
“We are not thinking about Manchester United only,” Ceferin said. “We’ve had five or six owners of clubs who want to buy another club. We have to see what to do. The options are that it stays like that or that we allow them to play in the same competition. I’m not sure yet.
“We have to speak about these regulations and see what to do about it. There is more and more interest in this multi-club ownership. We shouldn’t just say no for the investments for multi-club ownership, but we have to see what kind of rules we set in that case, because the rules have to be strict.
“From one point of view, it’s true if you are the owner of two clubs and they play in the same competition, you can say to one club to lose because you want the other to win. But for you, as a football player, do you think it’s so easy to do that, to tell a coach [to] lose the match because the other wants to win?”
The UEFA president went on to say the governing body was “terribly sorry” for the chaos that engulfed last season’s Champions League final, which saw innocent Liverpool supporters teargassed by Paris police who had wrongly accused them of being ticketless.
Aleksander Čeferin was speaking on The Overlap, in partnership with Sky Bet
