UEFA president gives green light for Jassim to buy Man Utd

UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin has hinted that he intends to give the green light for a £5billion Qatari takeover of Manchester United.  The chairman of the Qatar Islamic Bank, Sheikh Jassim bin Hamad Al Thani, is the frontrunner to become the next Red Devils owner ahead of Ineos founder Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

However, his advances have been met with stark resistance from many of the club’s supporters over concerns about sports washing. Fans have come out in their masses, launching a new campaign group ‘United against Sportswashing’ in protest of Jassim’s proposed takeover.

This also opens up the debate about multi-club ownership with Paris Saint-Germain already in possession of a subsidiary of the state’s sovereign wealth fund Qatar Investment Authority (QIA). Jassim claims his bid has nothing to do with the authority despite his family’s historic links with QIA.

And in a shocking admittance during an appearance on US football podcast Men In Blazes Ceferin affirmed that his organisation “pretend” that at least one club playing in UEFA competition does not share the same owners with another.

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.”

Ceferin said that the question of multi-ownership went deeper than just its potential effect on UEFA competitions. He added: “This is my dilemma to be honest. I am not sure what will happen but for example, 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.

“You can think that if two clubs owned by [one person] competing in the same competition can agree who wins and who loses – although it’s not easy to do that [fix matches]. But if I cannot play in the same competition as the other club of mine then I can lose in my national league because it doesn’t matter if I am a champion [or not]. It’s quite a complicated topic but I don’t have a solution yet.”

Speaking specifically about Jassim’s move for United, he added: “I don’t have a problem with nation-state ownership [of clubs]. if the rules are strict and they obey the rules.”