Champions League reforms explained & Chelsea takeover latest
The Athletic FC Podcast
The Athletic
4.0 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2022
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mark Chapman & The Athletic's Matt Slater speak to Dariusz [Darius] Mioduski Owner and President of Polish team Legia Warsaw and Vice-Chairman of the European Club Association about a range of topics including; how reforms to the Champions League were negotiated and how they work, making European football more competitive & what financial fair play really means for clubs across Europe.
Matt also brings an update on the shape of the final three bids to purchase Chelsea from Roman Abramovich.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Athletic |
| 0:02.7 | Hello, I'm Mark Chalm and welcome to the Business and Sport podcast on the Athletic |
| 0:18.3 | Matt Slater with us as usual. |
| 0:20.7 | We'll get the latest on the Chelsea takeover a little later in the athletic. Matt Slater with us as usual. We'll get the latest on the Chelsea |
| 0:22.3 | takeover a little later in the pod. But first of all, Matt, you've been in conversation with |
| 0:28.5 | Darius Mioduski, owner and president of Poland's most successful club. That's Legia Warsaw. |
| 0:34.5 | And also he's vice chairman of the European Club Association. Yeah, he is. And that's |
| 0:39.4 | really, I suppose it was the sort of second half of his of his job spec there that is the reason |
| 0:45.7 | I wanted to talk to him. I've been along to various European Club Association meetings and he's |
| 0:51.2 | always impressed me. Very bright guy, obviously Polish. I think |
| 0:55.8 | he was educated at Harvard, a lawyer. It just speaks really well, really clearly. And the European |
| 1:01.9 | Club Association is an unusual group. We often sort of refer to them on this pod. They were born |
| 1:07.6 | of, I don't know if listeners will remember the G14 group, which was the sort of, it was around about the 80s, the 90s, the richest clubs in Europe formed a little lobby group to really kind of lean on UEFA. And this is really where the Champions League came from. It was their pressure that turned the old European Cup into the Champions League. So think about guys like Berlusconi and Rangers were very involved at the beginning as well, |
| 1:31.8 | which again there's a little story there about how far we've come, I guess, over the last 25, 30 years. |
| 1:36.6 | Turning that old-fashioned knockout competition, which had loads of jeopardy, |
| 1:40.8 | i.e., a big team could play a big team in the first round and get knocked out. |
| 1:46.3 | And then we've morphed into this ever bigger league, basically, which is going to become a |
| 1:53.2 | proper league from 2024-25 onwards. The G14 were very much part of that. There were lots of |
| 1:59.9 | rows with UEFA over, things like, |
| 2:02.5 | oh, the release of players and club country rouse, and you name it. And there was a peace deal. |
| 2:09.0 | Eventually there was a peace deal. The European Union got involved, competition law got involved, |
| 2:14.1 | and the G14 was scrapped. It even, it had grown to like 20 clubs by that point anyway. |
... |
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