After reading this in today's Times by the respected Martin Samuel explaining the utter shenanigans at UEFA I feel we are for it:
Watch out, Palace, you may get stitched up good and proper
In 2005 Uefa was faced with a dilemma. Liverpool had won the Champions League, but finished outside the Premier League qualification places for the following season’s tournament. No problem, you may think, they simply return as holders. Except nobody at Uefa had made provision for that. It had never occurred to anyone within the organisation that a team capable of becoming champions of Europe would not also qualify domestically.
So they turned to the FA for help. English football could remedy this, by taking out the fourth-placed qualifiers and giving the berth to Liverpool. The fourth-placed team that season was Everton. Brian Barwick was chairman of the FA at the time and a known Liverpool fan.
He approached the problem from two directions. The first was through an innate sense of fair play. That season’s domestic competition had begun with the understanding that the top four qualified for the Champions League. Everton had done that, fair and square. It was not right to then tell them that, no, their achievement had been overwritten by a rule not even in place. His second motivation — though never stated — was that he probably liked having a house with windows and a company Jag that wasn’t on fire, and both of those preferences were best served by not removing Everton and giving their spot to his team, Liverpool.
So Barwick informed Uefa it was not the FA’s job to make its rulebook work and suggested it found a way of resolving its own problem. Which Uefa duly did. It put Liverpool in at the first qualifying stage and amended the rules so that, in future, if the holders did not qualify automatically, they took the place of the last through the door — which is what happened when Chelsea usurped Tottenham Hotspur in 2012-13.
Liverpool have benefited in the past from flexible Uefa rules regarding Champions League qualification
ETSUO HARA/GETTY IMAGES
Meaning when it really matters, Uefa tiptoes around even its most keenly held principles, all of which makes one think
Crystal Palace are about to get stitched up good and proper. Uefa seems to be doing all it can to give Lyon time to fight their demotion to France’s Ligue 2 over the financial chaos that has engulfed the club. If they are reinstated, that puts them back in the Europa League and may bounce Palace out, because John Textor still had an interest in both clubs when Uefa’s multi-ownership deadline for this season’s competition passed on March 1.
So Palace are punished for not anticipating a first trophy win in their history from months out, while Lyon’s own deadlines for compliance appear elastic. A cynic would suggest that, as this will be Lyon’s 38th season in Uefa competition, compared with Palace’s first, with the next game Lyon’s 254th, a degree of favouritism may be in play.
Then there is agitation from Nottingham Forest, who seek promotion from the Conference League to the Europa League in Palace’s place, and whose owner, Evangelos Marinakis, is also a seasoned European campaigner and knows how to play the blind-trust game rather well to get around multi-ownership issues. That is why Forest welcomed several new directors before the March 1 deadline, and bade them farewell in June, once they could not be in the same competition as Marinakis’s other club, Olympiacos.
So it’s a racket and those on the inside know how to work the system, while those outside watch, astonished by the audacity of it all. The latest suggestion is that Palace may take legal action over the delay in Uefa’s ruling on Lyon, although their own plea for Uefa to set aside its March 1 deadline may count against that. And if you think it all sounds as if they make it up as they go along, according to who is the richest, the most powerful and most politically astute, you may know much more than you think.