Ceferin lays bare UEFA’s pretense

UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin has admitted that his organisation "pretend" that at least one club playing in UEFA competitions does not share the same owners, although one entity owning more than one club is not in contradiction to any rules.

The complication, according to UEFA's laws, arises when two clubs owned by the same entity are participating in the same competition, such as the Champions League. Speaking on the football podcast Men In Blazers, Ceferin said: "For now we are just discussing it. There are clubs – or at least one – where we still pretend it's not the same owner [as another] but it's the same owner, and I will not tell you which. You can guess.

"One or two of those potential bidders for another club said to me, 'Look we have, like, 250 companies. We can do it [the takeover] from another company but we don't want to do that. Because it's us. We can circumvent the rules'. They don't want to do it. So we have to discuss things.

"You can be an owner of two, three, four, five clubs. That is not a problem for UEFA. The problem is you cannot play in the same competition."