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by igsomething 2 days ago
The same UEFA that added redundant matches and teams to the Champions League for money, and that came up with the Nations League because they wanted to extract more money from the national teams?
3 comments

While I agree the extra CL games are not a great idea, they are not a very bad one either.

The Nations League is a good idea, for a number of reasons:

1. It gives smaller teams, like Gibraltar, Malta etc, a chance to play competitive football against teams their level and a chance to actually get better. In the old system, the only way for Gibraltar to play a competitive game, was to play in the Euro or WC qualifications, against the likes of Germany, Spain, England etc and get trashed. They can't get better if they have no chance to win.

2. Nations League brings money to the various FAs, a google search suggests anything between €750,000 to €10.5 million, as opposed to extracting money from the FAs.

3. The Nations League games replaced a bunch of friendlies. Now those games matter.

Funnily enough it was Infantino who lead the introduction of the Nations League.
And attempted to hive off the best teams into a super league, even though this would have destroyed national leagues across the continent.
The Super League was decidedly not UEFA's - UEFA even announced sanctions against the organisers (though I think those were repealed by a court), because it was going to compete with UEFA's leagues.