UEFA

The Real Madrid vs PSG game in March had been billed as a showdown of soccer's new money against European aristocracy, and Real Madrid, representing the old ...

Such a punishment is unlikely to hurt a team with the resources of PSG or Manchester City, another club bankrolled by Gulf billions that has repeatedly challenged — and avoided — major sanctions from UEFA. UEFA’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, has long brushed aside such concerns, and he even insisted that al-Khelaifi, a Qatari who is a close confidant and occasional tennis partner of the Gulf country’s ruler, remain on its board as he fought a corruption case in Switzerland. In 2018, the club faced the possibility of being excluded from at least a season of Champions League soccer after being found to have breached UEFA’s financial control regulations. What had been known as the Financial Fair Play system now will be known as “financial stability” regulations. Maduro, meanwhile, said that UEFA’s actions have “created suspicions” that PSG operates under a different set of rules. But UEFA’s investigation into al-Khelaifi — who in addition to his role at PSG, one of Europe’s richest clubs, is also the chair of beIN Media Group, the Qatar-based company that is one of UEFA’s biggest partners — dragged on. It appeared on Page 5 of a six-page document listing outcomes of recent disciplinary cases: UEFA said it would ban Leonardo — who had since left PSG — for one game for violating “the basic rules of decent conduct.” Instead of signing up, though, al-Khelaifi said PSG sided with UEFA, lobbying publicly and privately to help crush the revolt. He told The New York Times that the timing of the resolution alone felt intentional. The al-Khelaifi case comes at a particularly sensitive time for UEFA. The game in March had been billed as a showdown of soccer’s new money against European aristocracy, and Real Madrid, representing the old guard, had triumphed. Within 24 hours of the incident, UEFA announced that it had opened a disciplinary investigation.