The Athletic.

Hello, I'm Mark Chapman.

Welcome to the Business of Sport podcast on The Athletic, alongside me as ever,

from The Athletic Football News

reporter Matt Slater. And today we are going to focus on the possibility of a European

Super League or the restructuring of the Champions League. We're going to talk to two executives

from European leagues. Now that's an organisation that works with the Premier League,

the Bundesliga, La Liga and others to lobby against the more radical proposals

for European club competition reform.

Welcome to the business of sport from the Athletic.

So to start, Matt, we're going to look at what I suppose you would call the ongoing power struggle

between UEFA, Europe's richest clubs, the domestic leagues as well.

To bring us up to speak of where we're at now, I think we should probably go back to 2019.

As we know, broadcast contracts, commercial contracts run for a few years of advance.

The current set up in Europe of the way the Champions League is arranged and sold takes us up to

the end of the 2023-24 season. So that's all sorted. It's all nailed down. Every three years we kind of have an

argument about how to distribute the money, but the actual formats are decided. As I say,

the big broadcast contracts, the big commercial contracts are settled. So 2425 has been there for a while

as a potential fresh start. Now, things have kind of been pretty set since about the mid-90s when we went from

the old-fashioned European Cup, where it was, as you say, straight knockout champions

to the Champions League, which is, of course, we've all got used to this where they're

not all champions in there.

...