By Andrew Warshaw
December 16 – The head of European football today took a veiled swipe at next week’s FIFA-organised Global Summit to determine the future of the game, hinting he expected little or nothing to emerge from what many perceive as a glorified talk shop.
Monday’s virtual summit, the equivalent of a mini-FIFA Congress, is set to involve all 211 FIFA federations and has been arranged in the wake of widespread criticism of Gianni Infantino’s plan to stage the World Cup every two years.
With the proposal all but placed on the backburner, FIFA is anxious to take back the moral high ground and find some other consensus for the development of the game going forward.
But UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin intimated that Monday’s talks could simply be a waste of time.
“The first proposal was to have an extraordinary congress to vote on the idea (of a biennial World Cup) which we strongly opposed,” Ceferin told reporters at a virtual press conference following the final UEFA executive committee of the year.
“It’s very hard to now think about any compromise or negotiation if you don’t have any information. Having 500 or so people at a video conference, I don’t expect anything very deep. We don’t even have an agenda.
“The only thing we know is that it’s called Future of Football. That can mean a lot – or it can mean nothing.”
“I might be naïve but I really hope we can start speaking with some documentation, concrete proposals or serious ideas.”
With the spread of the new Covid variant threatening to rip through European football once again (another English Premier League fixture tonight has just been postponed), Ceferin revealed that UEFA was launching a new video highlighting the importance of getting vaccinated.
“I think they (the players) should get vaccinated as soon as possible,” said Ceferin, “but I still believe that it’s a personal choice.”
Ceferin also commented publicly for the first time about last Monday’s farcical last-16 Champions League draw that had to be redone due to a technical error.
“When something went wrong, we had a meeting, including with our auditors and the software external provider. Both proposed we redo the (whole) draw since they could not be certain exactly when this error happened. Our decision was to be transparent and not hide anything.
“Objectively it was UEFA’s fault although it was the software. We should be less dependent on technology and of course we apologise. But it was not a human mistake.”
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