Europe's armchair alternative

So the deal that UEFA bosses hailed as the saviour of solidarity in European football has finally been done. Last week in Lausanne, Europe's governing body finalised the new structures of their club competitions and, as expected, it was entirely clear at first glance who the winners and losers under the new system will be.

For the winners, the prizes on offer are indeed glittering. UEFA expect the Champions League to generate around £400 million next season with a further £100 million being raised through the exploitation of pay-per-view television.

The additional television revenue will be distributed amongst the leading clubs - from Italy, Spain, Germany and England.

Even in basic prizemoney terms, though, the new figures are remarkable. If, as few people expect, Manchester United go on to win this season's Champions League, they can expect to gross around £15 million - which includes money from television, gate receipts, prizemoney and sponsors' bonuses.

Next season the basic match fee for each of the 32 participating teams in the league phase is around £750,000, with each draw earning the club an additional £125,000 and each win £250,000. At the knockout stages, the bonuses pretty much go through the roof, with the winners of the final itself picking up £5 million, £1 million more than the team they beat on the night.

Next season's winner could therefore earn twice as much. Even if a less glamorous club (ie, a club that wouldn't be entitled to the television bonus money) won the competition, they will earn around £16 million.

The losers, meanwhile, as you will have doubtless guessed, are the clubs from what UEFA clearly now sees as its peripheral member states. There was never really much hope that there would be any benefits for clubs from countries like Ireland in a scheme that was born out of the growing power and greed of the Continent's major players.

Still, the extent to which the majority of UEFA's affiliates have simply had to roll over and accept that they no longer have any real say in the way that the game is developing has been astonishing.

The amount of money finding its way into the game here will remain fairly constant and there is at least the consolation with this deal that national champions and a couple of other clubs will have the opportunity to make in excess of £100,000 from UEFA competitions. The FAI and IFA may receive up to a couple of million as their share of the centralised pay out.

Officials from the smaller nations will have needed little reminding from UEFA that Media Partners, who were attempting to establish a breakaway European Super League, would hardly have felt obliged to throw even these scraps in their direction. Doubtless, the threat of the Media Partners alternative prompted more or less unanimous backing of UEFA's proposals.

Aside from the way the cash has been distributed, however, there are more problems for clubs in Ireland because of the new structures. We can have little complaint about the number of qualification matches that National League clubs will have to win if one is ever to reach the lucrative league stages. We are ranked with the likes of Azerbaijan, Albania and Malta because our teams have repeatedly failed to beat sides they should have beaten.

The reorganisation of the UEFA Cup, however, is a more cynical move. Under the new format of the competition, which is quite frankly a complicated mess, two clubs from Ireland will be amongst the 82 entering the competition's first phase.

They will only have to win one round to earn the possibility of meeting the sort of highly-ranked side that might bring in television revenue or significant gate receipts, but that first round will be in mid-August, before our season gets going in earnest. They will have to come through three rounds before they make it the traditional, 32-club knockout stage.

The scheduling of the main competitions will also limit the freedom of clubs here to play domestic matches when they wish. Only last week Shamrock Rovers and Cork City were forced to bring forward the first leg of their League Cup final by a day in order to avoid clashing with Manchester United's televised match.

Next season a total of 14 Tuesday nights will be UEFA Cup nights, much as they were this year, but the Champions League, televised this season on 11 Wednesdays, will be spread over 17 Wednesday and 16 Thursday evenings. There will, boasts UEFA, be a total of 526 competitive European club matches over the course of the season and more of them than ever live on television.

Solidarity, eh? It can only mean that the whole of Europe will be sitting in to watch the box together.