The Council of Presidents of the National Professional Soccer Association (ANFP) of Chili This Thursday began a meeting with the aim of finding a debt solution of about 30 million euros contracted with the television channel TNT Sports, who has put in check the future of a divided Chilean football.
A judicial judgment ratified days ago after years of litigation forces the ANFP to indemnify the aforementioned channel for the suspension of 25 league matches between 2019 and 2020 -reached by the social revolt and the beginning of the pandemic -, including “the calculated current interests and those accrued until the effective payment of the debt.”
A varapalo for an institution that is already broken, but also an opportunity to reform a competition model and exploitation of audiovisual rights that the competition is unfair and adultery by favoring with a major part of the cake to the three teams considered ‘large’.
The options that are considered the presidents gathered in the coastal city of Viña del Mar walk, however, in a different direction, with the divided clubs. The proposal that has the most support is to increase the number of official matches to play each season. And there arises the greatest controversy.
The ‘greats’ want to recover the play-off format
The representatives of the most favored clubs for the distribution of television rights-among them Colo Colo, University of Chile and Universidad Católica-prefer to recover the Play-Off system-abandoned format in 2012-to elucidate the champion both of the opening and the closure, and leave as the current distribution of money is.
Incolds open to the option of modifying the Chilean Super Cup system to turn the final into a home run, as the Spanish Football Federation has done to content Saudi Arabia. The most modest clubs prefer, however, that the number of teams that dispute the league is increased – currently 16 – which would force to negotiate a new distribution of money.
A movement similar to that made by Argentine football, which formed two groups with a total of 30 teams in the maximum division of national football, and that would with all likelihood favor the competitiveness of Chilean football by consigning a more equitable distribution of television rights. “The first thing is to change the championship system. We have to increase the amount of clubs and to the medium or short term to get the second division,” Limache President César Villegas said before his colleagues, who already wanted to opt for the presidency of an ANFP divided and in crisis.
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The third proposal, which, like the first one, is more likely to get ahead, is that it is the clubs that pay the fine in installments, discounting a proportional part of the money each of them receives on television.
This option would lose weight its already cooled coffers and would affect the development of formative football, which is now barely receiving funds to train future stars of a country in a serious sports crisis.
