Slovenian Aleksander Ceferin, UEFA president since September 2016, will be a candidate in 2023 for a third four-year term at the helm of European football, he announced to member federations on Saturday on the eve of the draw for the qualifications of Euro-2024 in Frankfurt.
“Aleksander Ceferin took this opportunity to personally thank the 55 member federations for their letters of support received in recent weeks ahead of the upcoming election, officially confirming that he will stand for another term at the next UEFA Congress. in Portugal in 2023”, can we read in a press release sent by the European body. The elective congress is scheduled for May 5, 2023 in Lisbon.
An asserted authority against Fifa and against the Super League
Lawyer by profession, Ceferin, who will celebrate his 55th birthday next Thursday, had previously chaired the Slovenian Football Federation from 2011 to 2016. Discreet and less charismatic than his predecessor Michel Platini, Ceferin marked a firm opposition to the projects of his counterpart of Fifa, Gianni Infantino, former number 2 of UEFA, in particular the ephemeral project of a biennial World Cup instead of its usual four-year rhythm.
But Ceferin’s big challenge was above all the eruption of a breakaway European competition project, the Super League, in the spring of 2021. Launched by twelve major European clubs, the project aimed to supplant the lucrative UEFA Champions League had fallen short in the face of the fury of many supporters and the threat of political action.
Champions League and Financial Fair Play reforms
Three of these clubs (Real Madrid, FC Barcelona and Juventus Turin) continue to campaign for the Super League and this dispute over an alleged abuse of a dominant position by UEFA must be settled in early 2023 by the Court of justice of the European Union in Luxembourg. In response, UEFA launched a major reform of the Champions League for 2024, with 36 teams instead of 32, and an eight-day mini-league instead of the traditional group stage. TV rights have already been awarded for the record sum of fifteen billion euros over three years (2024-2027).
The other project launched by Ceferin concerns financial fair play (FPF), created to avoid excessive spending by clubs. UEFA reformed it in the spring, introducing a kind of ceiling on spending allocated to salaries, transfer fees and agent commissions, a reform whose long-term effectiveness will have to be measured.