April 18, 2021 will live in infamy for football fans across Europe. On that day some of European football's most powerful clubs, as well as Arsenal and Tottenham, announced that they wished to form the European Super League (ESL).
A closed tournament which ensured the richest clubs would get richer sparked anger among football supporters and rightly so. It would become a stain which Man City would soon be desperate to get rid of as fans turned against the idea entirely.
Remarkably, the ESL was so bad that UEFA even became the good guys for a period. Just two days later the idea was dead in the water as first Chelsea and then City withdrew from the 'modern football project'. As one-by-one teams dropped out of the league UEFA's self-righteousness grew.
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Instead of looking at the reasons behind this breakaway competition and working towards ensuring something similar does not happen again, UEFA relished in the glory of being victorious. The governing body decided to force the clubs involved to accept that UEFA was the supreme leader of football and should not be challenged.
Of course I have paraphrased there but that was the gist of what was a turbulent month for all involved. Fast forward to 2022 and UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin has decided to seemingly ignore the issues of 12 months ago and pursue a hostile relationship with his member clubs.
Pep Guardiola has often bemoaned the amount of fixtures that his players are faced with throughout the course of a season. His point would be poetically proven when four matches in the relatively inconsequential UEFA Nations League were added to the calendar a couple of weeks after the regular season curtailed.
Instead of reasoning though, Ceferin would go on the offensive effectively telling the likes of Guardiola to keep quiet because they could be working in a factory instead. Admittedly, feeling sorry for footballers can be a bit of a stretch in times of a cost-of-living crisis but would it have killed the president of one of football's top governing bodies to not jump straight on the attack.
Ceferin seems to have absolutely no clue how to deal with matters diplomatically. UEFA should be on the side of football teams but so often they seem to be more than happy to work against them.
This is exactly how projects like the ESL come about. If the likes of City continue to feel unappreciated by UEFA it will only stoke the fire for a Super League 2.0.
The president owes it to football fans to keep all of its clubs happy but this forceful, patronising, 'put up or shut up' approach is not the way to do. For football's sake Ceferin needs to help mend the fractious relationship that has been created by his organisation.
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