By Andrew Warshaw
November 21 – Europe’s new Nations League competition, designed to do away with meaningless friendlies, has proven far more successful than UEFA imagined, according to UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin.
The competition’s strength has been to pit similarly ranked nations against each other with the added carrot of promotion and relegation and potential qualification for Euro 2020 as well as winning the trophy itself.
The fiendishly complicated concept was at first greeted with scepticism verging on cynicism amid questions about needlessly introducing another competition.
But following the final series of group matches this week, Ceferin told a news conference it went even better than anticipated.
“The Nations League was and is even more successful than we thought,” he said.
“We always had complaints from the big football countries (saying) ‘We play with small countries, We don’t play amongst each other’ – and we always had complaints from small ones – ‘We never win’,”.
Both Ceferin and Andrea Agnelli, head of the European Club Association and chairman of Juventus, re-iterated at the same news conference that any idea of a breakaway European super league to challenge the Champions League was a non-starter.
Agnelli denied that plans for a Super League, including his own club, were back on the agenda as has been widely reported based on Football Leaks documents.
“What I can rule out from a Juventus perspective, from an ECA perspective, is no talks of a Super League have been carried out since 2015,” said Agnelli.
Ceferin agreed, insisting Europe’s leading clubs will remain part of UEFA but hinting at changes down the road that could redraw the European football landscape from 2024.
“We have some ideas,” Ceferin said. “All I can say is that any Super League is out of the question. Participation stays. And everybody will have an opportunity to compete in every European competition.”
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