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The
beginning of the end of the Champions League?
by Paul Davidson
Wednesday
the 18th October will not mean too much to many football fans, but
it is a date that should be remembered by people that love this
great game of ours. Something very, very important happened on that
day in a swimming baths in south-east London that could well affect
the way football is played all over Europe in the very near future.
Confused? You should be, but let me explain.
The
swimming baths in question is actually the National Sports Centre
at Crystal Palace and the event was a basketball match between the
London Towers and the Opel Skyliners from Frankfurt. Even more confused?
Well I'm not surprised. The significance of this event was that
this game, in the newly founded ULEB Euroleague was the first European
game in England played outside of the control of FIBA. FIBA (the
International Basketball Federation) is the basketball equivalent
of football's UEFA and/or FIFA and as such have had complete control
over any European club basketball competitions since they began
in 1958.
This
year though the biggest clubs in Europe, such eminent footballing
names as Barcelona, Real Madrid, Panathinaikos and Olympiakos among
them, told FIBA that they no longer wanted to play in their competitions
and would be forming their own one. This obviously caused enormous
ructions within FIBA and they vainly tried everything in their power
to stop this breakaway happening. The reason of course for all this
was unsurprisingly money. Basketball is big business in parts of
Europe.
Crowds
in Italy, Spain and Greece for example often exceed fifteen thousand
and the television audiences are quite often larger than those for
football. And what do large television audiences equal? Money. And
lots of it. And of course where there are wads of television money
there are vast amounts of officials wanting their share of it. FIBA,
being run along the same lines as UEFA, FIFA and the Olympic Committee,
naturally take a huge percentage of all the television money from
the European basketball competitions for themselves.
This,
naturally enough, infuriates the participating clubs in basketball
in exactly the same way that the splitting up of tv money for the
Champions League annoys Arsenal and Man Utd et al. So this group
of large basketball clubs decided to pull out of all the FIBA run
competitions and invent their own Euroleague, but with one major
difference. All revenue generated by the new league, including ALL
television money, is to be split up between the clubs involved,
with only a very small percentage going to the running of the league
itself as the new league is run by the clubs themselves.
It
need hardly be said that the giants of European football are monitoring
the situation very closely indeed, their greedy little eyes wide
open to the possibility of any extra money to swell their already
bloated coffers. And the early signs are that it will be an enormous
success, financially at least. With FIBA running around like headless
chickens unsuccessfully threatening to have any clubs participating
in this new league thrown out of their domestic competitions and
banned sine die from any other tournaments, ULEB (the new organisation's
title) coolly signed a contract with Spanish media giants Telefonica
for £20million.
With
this amount alone to be split between the participating clubs they
are already guaranteed far more than the £200,000 that FIBA give
the clubs in their equivalent, the Suproleague. And with many more
large sponsorships in the pipelines for the new league, it begins
to look like the expression 'cash cow' will fit the new organisation
very nicely. FIBA, having failed miserably to bring any sanctions
against any of the teams due to Europe's restraint of trade laws,
are naturally enough cacking themselves over the situation. Knowing
that they needed some cannon fodder for the big teams of Italy,
Greece and Spain, the new organisation went out and recruited teams
from smaller basketball nations like the UK, hence the Towers involvement,
Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
Throw
in some huge basketball clubs from Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Croatia
and Russia and they have built a formidable league indeed, certainly
far superior to the official FIBA Suproleague line-up. The new league
actually 'kicked off' as it were in the shadow of Real Madrid's
Bernabeu stadium two days before the game in London in front of
an attending audience of well over 10,000 with several million more
watching on tv. The home team, naturally enough Real Madrid, snatching
victory over favourites Olympiakos by 75 points to 73, to please
most of the onlooking fans and dignitaries that included many from
leading football clubs from across the continent.
Make
no mistake, it may only be happening in basketball at the moment,
but the eyes of the football world are very, very much upon it and
the success or failure of this venture could very well determine
the future of football. Not only the future of both FIFA and UEFA
themselves, but also the future of European and eventually even
our own Premier League. After all, what is the FA exactly other
than a smaller version of UEFA full of over paid officials raking
off money from the game to keep themselves in the luxury to which
they have become accustomed? Officialdom beware, ULEB is coming.
Keep watching this space. P.s. The Towers went on to prove that
it is possible to beat the Germans on home soil by recording a thumping
86-61 victory!
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