THE BIGGEST CRISIS FACING FOOTBALL
G14's plot to wrest control over European club competitions has met with the emphatic opposition of the Football Supporters' Federation.
The Guardian revealed on Saturday that the 18-club group had drawn up an internal policy document seeking to engineer greater influence over how Europe's elite club competition is run.
The FSF has grave concerns regarding the threat the G14 poses to the redistribution of football's funds and used its submission to the European football review that was instituted under an initiative by the UK sports minister Richard Caborn to raise them.
"We worry that the game is being hijacked by an arrogant elite," said the FSF, a body that is part-funded by the Professional Footballers' Association.
"The constant attempts by the bigger clubs across the European continent to expand their income and power - perhaps best evidenced by the creation of the rich clubs' club, the G14 - are not in the wider interests of the game or its supporters."
"The constant attempts by the bigger clubs across the European continent to expand their income and power - perhaps best evidenced by the creation of the rich clubs' club, the G14 - are not in the wider interests of the game or its supporters."
Privately, supporters' groups consider as laughable the claims by the G14 in its own submission to the European football review that "clubs are the grass roots" when its 18 members were admitted on the basis of self-selection. The FSF identifies the distribution of income as the inquiry's most "controversial" area of investigation, and immediately draws attention to the G14.
"The FSF believes that [the] whole ethos of G14 is contrary to the interests of the game," the organisation stated. "The redistribution of income and associated sense of solidarity, of being part of a football family is in severe danger of disappearing from European football."