All Things Regarding UEFA

The Cruyff Turn
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For once, UEFA have done something right:

Some of football’s leading coaches, including Real Madrid’s Carlo Ancelotti and Roma’s Jose Mourinho, will meet as part of a new Uefa advisory board.

The Uefa football board also includes high-profile former players such as Italy legend Paolo Maldini and ex-Wales forward Gareth Bale.

Its first meeting will be on Monday, 24 April.

The agenda includes the video assistant referee (VAR) system, handball and player behaviour.

Uefa says the board is “designed to give an institutional yet independent voice of experience and expertise on fundamental football-related topics, including the laws of the game, refereeing, match calendar, elite youth development and player well-being”.

England manager Gareth Southgate, former England defender Rio Ferdinand and former Liverpool and Everton boss Rafael Benitez are also part of the new body.

European’s football governing body said the “members were selected based on their outstanding club or national team football achievements, impeccable international reputation and extensive experience”.

“Uefa is delighted to see that the very ones who have shaped the game’s history with their talents and philosophy through decades are gathered again around our common goal - to protect the game of football and its essential values,” said Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin.

Uefa football board members:

Jose Mourinho, Roma manager

Eric Abidal, former France defender

Carlo Ancelotti, Real Madrid manager

Gareth Bale, former Wales forward

Rafael Benitez, former Liverpool manager

Fabio Capello, former England manager

Petr Cech, former Czech Republic keeper

Rio Ferdinand, former England defender

Luis Figo, former Portugal forward

Robbie Keane, former Republic of Ireland striker

Jurgen Klinsmann, South Korea manager

Ronald Koeman, Netherlands manager

Philipp Lahm, former Germany defender

Henrik Larsson, former Sweden striker

Michael Laudrup, former Denmark attacking midfielder

Paolo Maldini, former Italy defender

Roberto Martinez, Portugal manager

Juan Mata, Galatasaray midfielder

Predrag Mijatovic, former Montenegro forward

Gareth Southgate, England manager

Patrick Vieira, former France midfielder

Rudi Voller, former Germany striker

Javier Zanetti, former Argentina defender

Zinedine Zidane, former Real Madrid manager

It remains to be seen how much this board will effectively have power to change things, but it’s good to see genuine professionals involved for topics like match calendar, refereeing, player well-being etc.

Rafa is involved in there as well, which is good to see, as I can’t imagine someone better for such a job.

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A lot of egos there

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Rio Ferdinand sort of lets the side down IMO…
What has he got, that he can contribute - May as well have put Matt Le Tissier in there :0)

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Surprised Jermaine Jenas isn’t there.

He’s everywhere else.

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Not a woman in sight.
Outrage alert

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Glad Rafa is there.

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Rafa and Peđa Mijatović - I’m not biased at all! :slight_smile:

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It’s meaningless. They have no input and it ignores that “football people” are actually in the IFAB committees that actually decide these things.

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Rafa might bring up the crowd problem in Paris, and tear them off a strip

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aye…

very good ya bam,

some teams dont even stick to FPP rules

what chance you got with this…

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Good luck with trying to implement that one.

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Well, at least he breaks a taboo.

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The Belgians look to again be fucking up the transfer market

TLDR - Antwerp challenged UEFA’s homegrown rules saying they were unfairly penalized by the small size of their country. The courts rejected the argument, but then said they didnt think the association trained part of the rule made any sense and has now opened the door to that part being challenged.

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Fans left sidelined and with nowhere to go thanks to Uefa’s bumbling genius

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The No 107 tram pulls up next to a racecourse just outside Gelsenkirchen and judders to a halt. We wait. And wait a little more. Five minutes become 10, and then 15. Songs and idle chat gradually turn to sighs and anxious hubbub. One England fan thinks this tram might be getting diverted back to Essen. Another thinks it might be going straight to the stadium. In fact, its final destination is Gelsenkirchen railway station, where – as one of the few passengers with working phone signal confirms – the crowds are “utter carnage”.

Which is also a pretty decent description of the tableau unfolding outside the windows. Here thousands of England fans in various states of distress and confusion, some in shirts and some not, are swarming in all directions across the pasture: some staggering, some running, some trying to clamber over the metal crash barriers in an attempt to reach the tram, some succeeding and some failing comically.

Oh, and it’s raining an apocalyptic storm, lending the whole scene a kind of epic dystopian quality, like a scene from Blade Runner. There are crying wet children. Grimacing wet adults. Columns of German riot police jogging down the street in formation, looking for wet Englishmen to baton, even though there is not the faintest wisp of violence. Back in the tram, 35 minutes becomes 40, and then 45.

The problem, which we only really manage to piece together in retrospect like a bad dream, is that Trabrennbahn on the edge of town is where the local authorities have decided to host a fan park. From which (too many) fans can get (not enough) shuttle buses to the Arena AufSchalke, where England are playing Serbia in – checks watch – just over an hour. Trouble is, to get from the fan park to the shuttle buses, you need to cross the tramway. Which soaking England fans are now doing in their hundreds. And so everyone is stuck.

Just one tale of logistical incontinence among many more, and – in the scale of things – a fairly tame one. Spoiler alert: I made it to the game in the end. Although only after plenty of swearing at uniformed officials and by the grace of a biblical miracle. We were milling around Gelsenkirchen a little while later, watching packed trams slide past and fiddling pointlessly with taxi apps when a bus suddenly appeared out of nowhere, opened its doors and everybody blindly poured inside. And that was that.

On the drive to the stadium we passed thousands of fans who had given up on any form of wheeled transport and decided to trudge the four miles up the dual carriageway. Some had been separated from their mates, some were shivering from the cold, some had dead phone batteries, some were carrying children. I heard from fans who sat on motionless trains for an hour, from fans who queued for two hours for a bus, from fans indefinitely squashed in dangerously overfilled trams without water or toilets or phone signal. They were still piling into the arena 20 minutes after the start, dishevelled and exhausted, having missed [the only goal of the game.

And the only point to make here, really, is that there should probably be a better way of doing all this. Were this an isolated incident in an otherwise smoothly run machine, we could probably overlook it. But already there have been transport problems in most of the host cities, interminable delays on the rail network, horrific overcrowding on public transport. And of course in this regard, Uefa has already offered plenty of evidence of its own incurable inability to run a smooth showpiece event, its propensity to treat fans as a security threat, an enemy army to be defended against, rather than human beings trying to get to a football game.

But to the disorder of Wembley in 2021 and the disgrace of Paris in 2022 and the dysfunction of Istanbul in 2023 can be added the disarray of Germany 2024. And while the symptoms may be different, the common thread is an apparent indifference to the ordinary fan experience, a capacity to spread misery, a very late-capitalist absence of basic human dignity at virtually every stage of the process. We hear a lot about the trouble football fans cause, the potential for violence and mayhem that in reality is only ever embodied by a tiny minority. But when you consider how they are regarded and problematised by the authorities, perhaps the only surprise is that it doesn’t kick off more often.

Because pretty much without exception, the fans I have encountered at this tournament have not been thugs or criminals, or freeloaders or troublemakers. They are, quite simply, people trying to get to a place. Who have spent thousands of pounds on this trip, booked leave, made plans, left pets with the neighbours. And done so because the buzz of live tournament football is still one of the greatest narcotics in existence. It takes a certain bumbling genius to take that simple optimism, and squeeze every last drop of joy out of it.

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Is UEFA run by the Tories too?

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Yes.

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The entire world is run by, and for, the neoliberal elite.

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You can bet on that.

I’ll get my coat.

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I assume Lisa Nandy cancelled the brown envelope payment.

It’s absolute nonsense as the people at the end of the article say.