Sources: Man City under the microscope as details of Uefa ban revealed
There is confusion within industry circles about Uefa’s stance on multi-club ownership models such as the one employed to great effect by Man City, Football Insider has learned.
Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin recently suggested that a “rethink” of the conflict of interest rules relating to multi-club investment was needed at the continental level.
He proposed that one option was to lift the ban on clubs in the same ownership group playing each other in Uefa competitions as there is little reason to suspect it would damage the competitions’ integrity.
But his comments – which he made during his appearance on Gary Neville’s YouTube show The Overlap last Thursday (16 March) – appear to contradict the findings of a Uefa review published only a month ago.
Almost an entire chapter of The European Club Footballing Landscape report was dedicated to the rise of multi-club investment, which it said had the “potential to pose a material threat to the integrity of European club competitions.”
There are now 82 clubs in Europe that are part of a wider multi-club network, and it is claimed that the growing risk of these sides meeting each other in European competition raises conflict-of-interest questions at a governance level.
City Football Group, for example, has stakes in four clubs in Europe besides flagship investment Man City – Troyes in France, Girona in Spain, Lommel SK in Belgium and Palermo in Italy.
Man City are the only team in the hive that currently competes in Europe, but the group’s intercontinental track record of success suggests there is every chance that one of the satellite clubs could one day qualify for Uefa competition.
Several industry figures consulted by this site believe that Ceferin’s comments are short-sighted, underestimate the scope for duplicity, and are inconsistent with what appears to be Uefa’s party line on this matter.
Wider worries about multi-club ownership eroding individual clubs’ sense of identity have been identified by experts too.
City Football Group’s proposed takeover of Dutch side NAC Breda fell through in April last year because supporters did not wish their club to be one cog in a machine whose ultimate aim is to serve the interests of the mothership.
The Footballing Landscape report also suggests that multi-club ownership could also have a distorting effect on the transfer market because of the rise in player trading between associated clubs.
In other news, Chelsea and Man City battle to sign Romeo Lavia as new clause details revealed.