Crystal Palace manager Patrick Vieira says Steve Parish has the credibility to express himself and be listened to after he hit out at UEFA and its president Aleksander Ceferin last week. Parish was speaking at the Financial Times’ Football Business summit in London where he described UEFA as the ‘greatest enemy to domestic leagues’ and accused Ceferin of ‘pick-pocketing’ non-elite clubs.
Steve Parish said: “I wish 10 per cent of the scrutiny that is shone on the Premier League and governance in the UK is shone on the governance at UEFA,” he told the summit. To hear this morning Ceferin paint UEFA as the saviour of football and the supporter of the fans was quite incredible. If you ask pretty much every football club outside of the gilded 20 that run the ECA, most people would tell you UEFA are the greatest enemy to domestic leagues that exists. You’ve got a completely opaque executive committee, people from individual clubs with far too much say, far too much pressure. You’ve got the ECA which is 20 clubs that decide everything and you’ve got a tournament in the new Champions League proposals that looks so much like the Super League you can’t tell the difference. In fact in some regards, they’re worse. If there is one thing [Juventus chairman] Mr Agnelli, [Barcelona president] Mr Laporta and me can agree on, clubs should run tournaments and the governing body of the game should govern the game. While we have this inter-locking where FIFA and UEFA, the people in charge, and there’s nobody over the top to govern and regulate it, then I think we’re in trouble. We seem to be sleepwalking into it while Mr Ceferin picks all our pockets.”
Vieira was asked about Parish’s comments during his pre-match press conference for Wolves last week and said his chairman’s comments had to be listened to thanks to his credibility within the game.
Patrick Viera said: “When you look at when he bought the club and where it is today, he has the credibility to express himself. He went through what the club is today and I think he managed to build a sustainable football club. His experience has to be listened to. I think he has the credibility and experience to express himself regarding what is going on at the moment.”
Parish went on at the summit to critique UEFA’s Champions League reforms, which include adding four more teams and scrapping the current group stage to replace it with one single league of 36 sides. The Europa League and Europa Conference League are both set to evolve in the same way, with all this coming into effect from the 2024/25 season.
Steve Parish said of the reforms: “He [Ceferin] uses the Super League as this nasty, terrible thing that he managed to stop when frankly he was part of making something happen with coefficients with 40 per cent of the money being decided on your last five years of history and already pulling the drawbridge up. He talks about the tournament being extended from 32 to 36 teams. Is he including in that, the teams I traditionally saw in the Champions League? He’s trying to give two more people places who will provide the most media revenue to him in any given year. All of these competitions have an element of being gerrymandered in a way that only certain clubs can take part. At least with the Super League, they didn’t try to hide it. With UEFA it’s happening by stealth.”
