UEFA considers revising multi-club ownership restrictions

As Manchester United's takeover is in question the European football body is looking at the same company proprietorship.

Clubs with the same owner are now prohibited from competing in the Champions League at the same time, but UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin is considering changing this rule.

A move like that might have a big impact on the purchase of Manchester United. The two leading candidates for controlling the Red Devils are thought to be Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani.

There's a catch, though. While Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad al-Thani is the president of Qatar Islamic Bank, which is generating questions about connections to Qatari-owned Paris Saint-Germain, INEOS already owns OGC Nice.

Nevertheless, it is rumoured that the Qatari attempt to buy Manchester United is unlikely to occur through Qatari Sports Investment (QSI), the company that owns PSG, but rather through a charitable corporation named Nine Two.

The expectation that PSG and Manchester United would compete in the Champions League every year may cause UEFA to modify its position on multi-club ownership.

The Times' transcription of Ceferin's forthcoming in-depth interview with Gary Neville's The Overlap revealed that Ceferin is considering reevaluating the Champions League multi-club ownership restrictions.

“We are not solely thinking about Manchester United. We’ve had five or six owners of clubs who want to buy another club. We have to see what to do.”

The chairman of UEFA appears to imply that no football player or manager will follow the orders of their club's owner if that owner decides to lose to a rival team he owns.

“If you are the owner of two clubs and they play in the same competition, you can say to one club to lose because you want the other to win”, Ceferin assesses. “But for you, as a player, do you think it’s so easy to do that, to tell a coach to lose the match because the other wants to win?”