By David Owen
October 23 – A new TV documentary on the career of former UEFA President Lennart Johansson has been produced by the Swedish company, Mastroc Mediaproduktion.
The near hour-long documentary, entitled Mr Football – the man who changed the game for ever, outlines in particular the 84 year-old administrator’s vital role in the creation in 1992 of the Champions League. It includes contributions from a string of household names, ranging from the great Swedish player Zlatan Ibrahimović to the men who beat him in elections for the most powerful posts in the game: Sepp Blatter, President of FIFA, and Michel Platini, Johansson’s successor in the UEFA hot-seat.
On the Champions League, the documentary uses comments from Johansson himself, Gerhard Aigner, former UEFA Secretary General, and sports marketing specialists Klaus Hempel and Jűrgen Lenz, to home in on a key meeting of UEFA’s Executive Committee at the Royal Garden Hotel in London.
Lenz, who describes himself and Hempel as “midwives” of the competition with Johansson its father and UEFA its mother, discloses that “two German private persons” basically provided the finance, “backed by a bank guarantee from Deutsche Bank”.
For England manager Roy Hodgson, the Champions League “stopped the top clubs from breaking away to earn more money” and “kept football surviving in most European countries because, of course, had the breakaway league been allowed to be formed, then for many, many countries the national football in that country would have basically ceased to exist”.
In one of the documentary’s lighter moments, former Manchester United goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel tells the story, recalled from a TV report, of how towards the end of the 1999 Champions League final, Johansson was ushered into an elevator in the Nou Camp to prepare to present the trophy to Bayern Munich, who had led for most of the match. By the time the elevator ride finished, Bayern’s opponents Manchester United had equalised, and by the time he had ridden back up, expecting extra time, United striker Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had poached the winner.
“I remember that I was about to congratulate the wrong team,” Johansson recollects drily.
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