AWhen the European Championship final was whistled in 2016 in Paris, Aleksander Čeferin, a lawyer from Ljubljana, was President of the Slovenian Football Association. In the world of the global football business, which is not exactly poor in colorful figures, there was no talk of him. Others have played in the Super League of officials for years: Joseph Blatter, Michel Platini, Franz Beckenbauer, Witali Mutko, Gianni Infantino.
In autumn 2016, however, when the European Football Union (UEFA) was looking for a successor to the intolerable Frenchman Platini, Čeferin, 49 years old at the time, stepped into the limelight. Anyone wondering who is actually at the helm of UEFA quickly ended up with the question of how long the Slovenian would swim among the sharks. Čeferin provided the answer, this spring at the latest.
Not even three months have passed since UEFA, with its President at the helm, not only suppressed the Super League propagated by twelve European top clubs from Italy, Spain and England, but also filleted it according to all the art rules of association policy. Čeferin’s previous masterpiece as a sports functionary culminated in the self-portrayal as the savior of the game according to old fathers custom at the UEFA Congress.
Čeferin will fight back
A billionaire monopoly posed as a grassroots activist. Anyone who knows the business could consider whether he wanted to pull the corners of his mouth up or down, whether the charade. It became clear that a shark swims among sharks here. The current European Football Championship, on which hardly a day goes by without UEFA not making at least questionable decisions, shows which alliances Čeferin is forging in order to stay in the game.
He is courting Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán and Ilham Aliyev, and UEFA is now doing a major part of its business in China, all you have to do is look at the advertising on the boards that surround the European Championship pitches. Under its president, UEFA is in a comfortable position to also play its power play against the English with their football grail at Wembley. No corona exemptions for UEFA and its 2500 Very Important Persons? Then Viktor Orbán is looking forward to the final.
It seems as if the British were impressed, Sports Minister Oliver Dowden announced that they wanted to allow 60,000 spectators to the finals. Deal instead of Delta. And Čeferin knows that after the pandemic there is still a lot of money going into football. Its products, the EM, the Champions League, compete with the offer of the world association under Gianni Infantino. At the moment, at the request of Saudi Arabia, he is examining whether a world championship could not be better played out every two years. A scenario almost as alarming as the Super League. Aleksander Čeferin will fight back. And that will hurt.
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