Skip to main content

Coronavirus: Mini-tournament could decide Champions League and Europa League

The European Championship trophy and Euro 2020 logoA mini-tournament to decide the Champions League and Europa League will be one option put forward to ease fixture congestion caused by the coronavirus outbreak.
European football's governing body, Uefa, is hosting a video conference with major stakeholders on Tuesday.
Euro 2020 is set to be postponed to allow league seasons to be completed.
A source close to the situation says all parties must be ready to sacrifice something to reach a solution.
All 55 Uefa members, the boards of the European Club Association and the European Leagues, and a representative of world players' union Fifpro have been invited to Tuesday's meeting.
The Uefa members will also hold an additional meeting to discuss their own reaction.

How would a mini-tournament work?

As with the Premier League, who on Friday stressed their commitment to completing the season, Uefa wants the Champions League and Europa League to reach a conclusion because they also have major broadcasting contracts to satisfy.
Both tournaments are at their last-16 stage, with six matchdays remaining, including the final. There are still 14 last-16 ties across the two competitions to be completed.
Playing the quarter-finals and semi-finals as one-off games would cut two fixtures off the remaining schedule.
Playing them over a handful of days as a mini-tournament - in Istanbul and Gdansk, host cities for this season's finals - would concentrate the matches even further, cutting down on travelling and cause the least disruption to the domestic leagues.
It has not been ruled out these games could be played in conjunction with league matches - nor does the Champions League final have to mark the end of the club campaign as tradition dictates.
Moving Euro 2020, due to take place at venues across Europe from 12 June to 12 July, to next summer would also free up more time to complete domestic and European fixtures.
However, that would then impact on next year's calendar.
Both the Women's European Championship, hosted by England, and the men's European Under-21 Championship, in Hungary and Slovenia, are scheduled for the summer of 2021. The Nations League, the draw for which was held earlier in March, is due to be completed next spring.
In addition, the first edition of the expanded Fifa Club World Cup is set to be held in China in June.
While the big domestic leagues have problems over television contracts to solve if games do not take place, most countries rely on the payments from Uefa that come out of major international tournaments to allow their own leagues to function properly. These would be at risk from any movement of the European Championship and are likely to form part of any agreement.
Uefa has an estimated 400 staff working on the Euros. It is unknown what will happen to them if the tournament does not take place for another 12 months.
The situation is not made any easier by not knowing when football will be able to resume.
Uefa accepts it is impossible to know when current travel restrictions will be lifted, but it cannot wait until they are to draft a plan.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

what is the most frightening thing that you have ever seen happen in life

It’s a man looking over his family during the British Raj in India. There were many cases of cannibalism and he feared someone would try to kill and eat his children or wife. I acknowledge this is a difficult picture to look at— but I included it for a reason. Many people in the US/West aren’t even aware of the terrible famines that swept through India and which are comparable to the holocaust in deaths (an estimated ~30 million people have died in famines in India). This was taken from the Great Famine of 1876–1878, which was far worse than the infamous Bengal Famine. It was caused by a crop failure/drought and was exacerbated by the crown’s export of wheat abroad. In total, 5.6 - 9 million people died (it’s hard to get exact figures). And within huge statistics like these, are forgotten stories. These are individuals and families, who slowly faced the despair of knowing they had no food and would have no food in the near future. They faced the horror of knowing there was

WHAT A HUSBAND TOLD HIS WIFE THE NIGHT OF THEIR MARRIAGE/ WEDDING

My wife, everyone has gone home. The music is quiet, the celebration is over. Our wedding was beautiful but it is now in the past. We have finished the wedding/marriage, it is now time to build our marriage. All that is left now is the two of us… What we will become tomorrow, starts from tonight. Our life is no longer the same. There was a day you put on one red dress… You looked so beautiful in it. That Day I wanted to just touch you! We were in the Cinema and I was so tempted. I wanted to just take you inside the toilet and kiss you but I couldn’t. Guess what? Now I have you forever, I can do that everyday. Before I take off your cloth and make love to you… let me tell you few things. I have nothing to hide from you from this day. My phone, you can use it like your own. You can access my facebook, my twitter and my Instagram From today, I have become a child. For the past five years of my life, I have been a man. I wake myself up in the morning, sometimes I go to bed hung

MARRIED OR NOT, YOU SHOULD READ This life moment

“When I got home that night as my wife served dinner, I held her hand and said, I’ve got something to tell you. She sat down and ate quietly. Again I observed the hurt in her eyes. Suddenly I didn’t know how to open my mouth. But I had to let her know crewhat I was thinking. I want a divorce. I raised the topic calmly. She didn’t seem to be annoyed by my words, instead she asked me softly, why? You know  I avoided her question. This made her angry. She threw away the chopsticks and shouted at me, you are not a man! That night, we didn’t talk to each other. She was weeping. I knew she wanted to find out what had happened to our marriage. But I could hardly give her a satisfactory answer; she had lost my heart to Jane. I didn’t love her anymore. I just pitied her! With a deep sense of guilt, I drafted a divorce agreement which stated that she could own our house, our car, and 30% stake of my company. She glanced at it and then tore it into pieces. The woman who had spent ten