Several Premier League football clubs have officially joined a new European football governing body created to represent clubs outside of the ‘European elite’.
The Union of European Clubs (UEC) is an organisation which seeks to ‘give a voice to more than 1,000 professional clubs in Europe.’
The UEC’s general secretary, Dennis Gudasic, has claimed that of UEFA’s £19.5bn revenue from club competitions over the past 25 years, 34% of it has been distributed to a group of just 12 clubs. This forms the basis of the reasoning for the UEC’s formation.
Representatives from 103 clubs were present for the official UEC launch in person or online, with English club’s Crystal Palace, Aston Villa, Brentford, Brighton and Watford all in attendance.
The UEC believes there are around 1,400 professional clubs in Europe that should be represented on Uefa decision-making boards in the same way that member clubs of the European Club Association (ECA) are.
The UEC claims that only 130 clubs have voting rights within the ECA and will campaign to try and seek more representation.
Speaking to the BBC, Crystal Palace Chairman, Steve Parish, said, “We’ve got six, now probably seven, teams [in England] where the amount of capital they have is either unlimited or is enormous compared to us, and qualifying for European football is almost impossible.
“It still doesn’t feel like a meritocracy entirely. And with the coefficient, it feels more and more that there’s a two-speed Premier League.
“You’re up against the situation where people have become so entitled with winning that they don’t accept any system which challenges the status quo or threatens it, and I think that’s what we have really got to look at across Europe.”
