Alex Muzio is the President of the Belgian football Club Royale Union Saint-Gilloise, founded in 1897 in Saint-Gilles, a municipality of the Brussels area. After taking over the Club in 2018 together with Tony Bloom – Chairman and majority owner of English Premier League club Brighton & Hove Albion – since July 2023 Mr Muzio owns a majority stake (75%) in the Club. Since April 2024 he is also President of the Union of European Clubs, an association aiming to represent the interests of non-elite football Clubs across Europe. In this interview, conducted a few days before the game of Union Saint-Gillloise with Inter on the third matchday of UEFA Champions League, Mr Muzio shares his views about the role of the UEC and several key issues for European football governance and financial ecosystem.
Question. Royale Union Saint-Gilloise will face Inter in the third matchday of UEFA Champions League. Another big night, after the Champions League winning debut in Eindhoven in September and the triumph in the Belgian first league last season, after 90 years. Not to forget that USG was promoted back to first league in 2021, after 48 years, and won the Belgian Cup in 2024, 110 years since last time, and also won the Belgian Super Cup in 2024 for the first time. Can we say that football miracles seem to be your cup of tea?
Answer. Yes, I would say so [smiling], but I am not sure what the next miracle could be, because I don’t think we are likely to win the Champions League any time soon. But, at the same time, we will keep trying to do the best that we can, we will keep pushing forward. If you try and stand still as a football club, that is a problem. You have to keep trying to move forward, as everyone else is doing the same – standing still is not really an option.
Q. Going back to the next Champions League game, but from a financial angle: if I remind you that there is a difference of around € 500 million in the economic size of Inter and USG, considering total revenues, what is your first thought when you think about this financial gap?
A. Excitement is definitely the first thought, as we have earned the right to play with teams with such a massive budget, and with Champions Leagues finalists. We don’t feel overconfident, but we are certainly not intimidated or scared. We don’t feel out of place, we feel we have the right to play, and we play at home. PSV also had a significant higher budget than us as well [USG won 3-1 in Eindhoven on the first Champions League matchday in September]. And we are not going to play any team in the Champions League with a lower budget than ours, or even a budget that gets within 3 or 4 times ours. All the teams will have a significantly higher budget than us, and Inter isn’t even the team with the highest budget that we play, given that we play Bayern Munich. So, I am excited, really, that’s the main thing.
The new Champions League format and the role of the UEC
Q. What do you think of the new format of the UEFA Club Competitions, based on the Swiss model with a 36-team league and each team playing 8 games (6 for Conference League)? Is this new format beneficial for USG?
A. I think for pot 4 teams it is beneficial for your chances to qualify that we now play two pot 4 teams [the 36 teams are divided into 4 pots based on the five-year UEFA Club coefficient and, for Champions League and Europa League, each team plays against two Clubs from each pot]. That’s the big change for a pot 4 team. Before, in the group stage with 4 teams, the pot 4 teams only played pot 1 to pot 3 teams. Now we have, in theory, more chances. Newcastle is one of the strongest teams in the competition, so we got a bit unlucky in the draw as we ended up playing a team that, despite its very high budget and quality, has not played much Europe recently, but that’s an outlier and that’s unusual. Normally, the new system would give us much more of a chance of success, which is exciting for us. I like that we play eight different teams, instead of three, and in general I am very positive about the format change: it has added several positives without too many negatives.
Q. Not only are you President and majority owner of USG, but you are also the President of the Union of European Clubs (UEC), since April 2024. The UEC aims to represent the interests of small and medium Clubs in Europe: would you agree with this definition of the UEC?
A. Yes, I would say so, because we view ourselves as a counterbalance to the new EFC (European Football Clubs) [formerly European Club Association, ECA, up to its rebranding in October 2025], which historically was public about being only for elite teams. Only recently, one team which made it into the ECA Board said they were delighted to join the Board of the ECA because it was the group that represented the interests of elite Clubs, and they were proud to join – this happened just a few months ago. So, it is clear that even though publicly the EFC, as they are called now, has changed to claim they represent all Clubs, the reality of the voting system of the Board, and even of the election of the ECA Chair, is very elite Clubs driven. And it is very difficult to get transparency on their vote and how their processes work, but it is pretty transparent that the elite Clubs have the control and have the power, and they use that. They want to have the vanity of representing all Clubs by putting on lavish parties, inviting celebrities and generally making the CEOs of small and medium Club feel involved, but without any plural power, without any right to change anything. So, as I said, we feel ourselves as a counterbalance to that Club group, and by definition that means small and medium Clubs.
Q. I am sure you daily life at USG is as busy and demanding as it has been successful. Your additional role at the UEC certainly adds a significant amount of work and stress – also considering that you have been building the association from its foundations, together with other key figures at UEC. So, the question is: why did you embark on this mission?
A. The first thing to say is that, while I am of course busy with Union Saint-Gilloise, I have empowered both Philippe Bormans, the CEO, and Chris O’Loughlin, the Sporting Director, to run the Club on a day-to-day basis. I feel it is very important for an owner and a chairman to be very clear to everyone in the structure of a Club about who the day-to-day control is with, and to have clear boundaries and clear lines – because otherwise, in lots of football Clubs you will end up in a situation where someone’s boss has told them how to do something, and then they walk down the corridor, bump into the Chairman and get different guidance – and who do you listen to? This creates confusion. So, while it is true that I am busy, I am not day-to-day organic in the functions of the Club, which does allow more flexibility and more time.
I am of the belief that football is very precious, and that it is not just another business. In other businesses you don´t have the passion and the love that people have for their Clubs. You have to stand up for the things you believe in, at times. I certainly believe that football is stretching out and is becoming very elite driven, in terms of players, in terms of finances. A lot of the time is gone and is not coming back, but we can pull back to make this trend a little bit slower and less dramatic. Ultimately, if you are a fan of football in Bulgaria, for example, Ludogorets has now won 14 titles in a row: you shouldn’t be hoping that your team comes second, you should have ambitions for your Club that are realistic, and as time goes on it is becoming less and less realistic that Club supporters have true dreams that can be fulfilled, and that’s a really bad thing.
Final point: it is October 2025, and if you guessed who will be in the UEFA Champions League quarter-finals Clubs in the 2026/2027 season, you would probably get six or seven teams out of eight, and if you were allowed to guess twelve teams, probably you would get eight out of eight. If you had asked the same question even 10 years ago, it would have been nothing as straightforward as it is today, and 20 years ago the answer would have been “I don’t even know who is going to qualify”. So, the speed of the change is very dramatic, and it needs some counterbalance before it is just gone and broken.
Q. And which are in your view the main drivers behind this trend that you are describing?
A. For the National Associations, from the 15th position in the UEFA ranking down, the situation is fueled by the lack of domestic television rights, the rise of UEFA television rights, the distribution of the funds and the distribution of solidarity payments. At the start of the season, in Serbia for example, Red Star Belgrade, according to various statistical surveys, was expected to qualify for the Champions League, and no other team in Serbia was expected to qualify for group stage at all. That would mean that Red Star Belgrade would have revenues of roughly € 40 million from TV rights, both Serbian/national and UEFA combined, and what comes next is essentially solidarity payments, because there isn’t really a particularly noteworthy Serbian domestic television deal. The graph of money spent and points earned is very well established: If you are earning € 40 million in a year and your rival, the second biggest team, is earning € 1 million, you can see how that would distort the league quite dramatically. And, if you say that National Associations from 25th/30thposition down don’t really get represented in the Champions League: if you play Europa League or Conference League and you compete in one of those domestic leagues, you will receive € 10 million, or € 7 million, and your rivals are receiving zero: given the budget in those countries, you could fund multiple years of being the biggest team in the country with one Europa League league phase appearance.
On top on that, I feel there is a bit more societal element: although this is not my expertise as I am mainly a football guy, whichever industry you look at, the biggest companies seem to be able to scale dramatically more than the others – think for example about the Googles, the Amazons, the Apples. You don’t get small firm manifacturers anymore, and everything has accelerated in that way, and one factor is globalization. The UEC does not necessarily think that everyone believes the same thing as us. But, the reason why the Super League was even a viable conversation is that attention for and attractiveness of the super big Clubs is a long way ahead of the other teams, and they do drive the watching and the money of the UEFA competitions. I think anyone who pretends otherwise is not being fair.
Q. Could you please elaborate further on the point of concentration of interest in the big Clubs?
A. The big change is that TV rights are now obviously so massive in terms of driving the revenues of the teams, plus social media now allow to promote products in a way that 30 years ago was not the case, and this has really accelerated all of the finances towards the biggest teams, because those are the teams people want to be associated with. Before, there was a spirit of solidarity and understanding that in sport it is not the same as in other industries. It would be a real treat if, in football in general, teams realized a bit more that they need each other, that they exist with each other. There is no point in being the best team in the country by a huge, huge margin. That wouldn’t be good for you. People seem to think that this would be good, that winning all the time would be great. I don’t think it is. I know that there are a lot of supporters of football Clubs who feel that way, and that’s their prerogative. I don’t want to say this is about being a good or evil thing, a right or wrong thing, it isn’t. But my perspective on football is much more about competitive solidarity: if Clubs are run well, everyone has a chance, but I am not sure that that’s the reality, and that’s a bit of a shame.
In football, it is supposed to be about community, about balance, it is supposed to be about everyone having a chance to win. But I am also not a communist who wants that everyone gets to win every now and again. But the spirit of solidarity and the spirit of competition have drained a bit. In the US NFL and in the Indian Premier League (IPL) of cricket, and also to a lesser but still noticeable extent in the Premier League in England, those three entities all realized the value of supporting competition: you don’t have a product in the long term if one team is so far ahead of everyone else, or even if two or three teams are so far ahead of everyone else, and you know at the start of the season who is going to win. But in the NFL, for example, you really don’t know who is going to win at the start of the season. In the IPL, when it starts, any team has a good chance of winning. And the Premier League knows this.
For many years, Paris Saint-Germain thought it was the locomotive that would drive the rest of Ligue 1. How has that worked out? They are gone from a € 1 bn planned TV rights to what it looks like around € 180 million in the first year, and just general chaos, because people are not interested in the Ligue 1 product any more, because there aren’t stories that they can enjoy and embrace, because they kind of know who the best team is, and who the next best teams are. You have just segmented the system to the extent that it is not interesting anymore. And I think what the giant super Clubs need to realize is that, in the long term, if this keeps happening people will lose interest to an extent – and by the time that happens, it will be too late.
Q. Is there any other specific element that concerns you?
A. I would like to note the duplicity of the big Clubs in the non-big-four leagues – because it is not big five anymore, as with the issue around the TV rights Ligue 1 can’t be part of “big leagues” anymore. Outside the big four, it is quite clear that the UEFA rights that big Clubs in those other leagues receive are not correspondent to the value that they add to European competitions. Those teams would lobby and bully at the domestic level and say they deserve more, but when it comes to UEFA competitions they turn their face completely 180 degree and seem to ignore the reality of UEFA competitions: because they realize that it’s not them driving 5 billion of TV revenues – that’s Liverpool versus Real Madrid, that’s Paris Saint-Germain versus Barcelona. And so they are being vastly overpaid as they get way more money from UEFA than they generate from the games with the TV figures that they get.
Elite clubs vs small and medium clubs: the clash between ECA and UEC heats up
The issue of solidarity for small and mid-sized clubs
Q. UEFA distributes € 308 million in solidarity payments to Clubs not participating to UEFA Club Competitions, and € 132 million to Clubs eliminated in qualifying rounds. UEFA also distributed, in agreement with the European Club Association, over € 230 million to around 900 European Clubs for releasing players for national team competitions, via the Club Benefits Programme. And FIFA distributes $ 250 million in solidarity payments from the FIFA Club World Cup, which will benefit club football around the world. So where is the issue for small and medium Clubs? Are they not already receiving substantial resources via redistribution of money which is primarily generated by big Clubs?
A. First, the distribution under the Club Benefits Programme mainly goes to big Clubs, because the big Clubs are the ones which have the international players. Second, on the FIFA Club World Cup solidarity payments: that has been talked about a lot, but it has not actually happened yet. I don’t know when that’s going to happen, if it is going to happen. People keep talking about it, but at some point you have to actually distribute the money. It is nearly November now – so, where is the money? Who is going to? When?
On the specifics of your question: yes, I understand that point of view to an extent, because fundamentally UEFA TV rights are for the Clubs that participate in the competitions, that’s who people are watching, so why would they not even keep all of the money, in theory? But again, that’s not what sport is based on, I would say. In England, for example, at the moment the Premier League distributes roughly 17% of its revenues down the pyramid. The pyramid is trying to fight for 25%, and I think probably it will end up somewhere in the middle. That’s a lot higher than UEFA is distributing, and UEFA as a body is for football, it’s for European football, it’s not a revenue generating operation, it’s not trying to make profit, whereas the Premier League is and is distributing significantly more solidarity. So, the numbers that you mentioned sound like very big numbers, but when you think that there are around 1,450 Clubs for them to go to….
Q. Could you describe the mission of the UEC in one sentence – or even in one word?
A. Balance. Because competitive balance is not working, it’s not right, you can see that very clearly, the data shows you that, from the way all of the leagues look now versus the way all the leagues used to look. So, balance is the first thing I would say. And then we are looking for financial sustainability, but I think the two go hand in hand somewhat, because while everyone is trying to chase their way up to receive the UEFA money in a lot of leagues, they lose a lot of money trying to get there, so there is no financial sustainability. If there was a flatter distribution, you wouldn’t feel the need to do this to survive. So, the two – competitive balance and financial sustainability – are pretty linked, but the balance is key.
Q. Which are, in your view, the main challenges for small and medium football Clubs in Europe?
A. First, domestic teams that don’t play European competitions regularly are suffering from reduced domestic TV rights, while their rivals are getting more from UEFA. And the balance is just being stretched. That is a significant challenge for our members, which is not being represented by other bodies in general, I would say. European Leagues would be the one most aligned to that, they also feel that this is happening.
Second, in general I think we are not necessarily rewarding the right things. We have our big policy at the moment, and another one will be revealed soon. The major policy we have now is the Player Development Reward (PDR) [the PDR would redistribute at least 5% of UEFA Club competitions revenues to Clubs which trained between the age of 12 and 23 players who participate to UEFA Club competitions]. Currently, UEFA solidarity is given essentially to any professional team in a top division generally, across Europe. Such solidarity payments are distributed whatever – you can be the best in youth development in your league or the worst, but you get basically the same amount. This is very good for football Clubs for cash flows, because the Clubs know that they are going to receive it. But it does not encourage you to do good development of players, because you get it in any case. And then you have FIFA transfer solidarity, which is the opposite: if you develop great talent, the player would probably go on and be sold for a lot of money, but you don’t know when and you can’t plan that solidarity coming in. Also, it is not perfect even in terms of being rewarding the best development, because some of the best players never move and some of them move all the time.
That’s why we came up with the PDR policy, because we think it’s the best of both worlds. We really think that if you develop top talents they will play in the top European competitions: and as you know at the start of a competition in September who is qualified for the competitions, you will be able to do very good projections on how much money you will make from your former youth players. This is a very important policy for us: we are trying to encourage good behavior of Clubs, and one of the best behaviors you can have as a football Club is to develop young talents.
Q. Can you say anything about the UEC upcoming proposal that you referred to?
A. We talked already about how the UEFA TV rights have been going up a lot and that domestic television rights are going down. There is a trend that I anticipate continuing. And the new policy is something around that.
Q. What has the UEC done, and what will it do, to help its members with the challenges you have described, on top your policy proposals?
A. Whereas the EFC is receiving roughly € 25 million to € 30 million a year from UEFA, we are receiving zero. We are involved in representing our members – that’s the best thing that we can do, with the finance that we have available. I am a volunteer. I receive no remuneration for my role in the UEC. I fund my own travels to events as well, rather than asking the UEC to pay, because I believe in this mission and I am happy to do anything I can do to help. In terms of what we do for members, we have for example offered legal assistance for the FIFA Clearing House, but in general providing services is not something we are able to fund at the moment the same way that the EFC because we don’t have any external funding.
Q. Union Saint-Gilloise has an extremely low ratio between the cost for players and its total revenues (around 50%), relative to most other football Clubs in Europe. As USG President but also as UEC President, would you say this is the main recipe for Clubs’ financial sustainability, or is it more complex than that?
A. It is definitely more complicated than that, I would say. And this is part of the problem with the system as it stands. Take the English Championship for example, or the Belgian second division and a lot of other second tier divisions: if you were to try and run your Club with 50% of revenues, you would probably have the lowest budget in the league and you would probably get relegated. Is that how we want football to be? You can’t be financially sustainable and also competitive, and I don’t think that’s how we want it, but in general, it is difficult to pay 50% of your revenues on your wages and survive in any competition, I would say.
Q. And yet you do it, at Union Saint-Gilloise.
A. We manage it, but you also have to bear in mind that in the first three seasons of our ownership we lost significant funds. There is no Financial Fair Play in Belgium, so we were not subject to that. At the start, we thought we had three possible paths: having a very low budget, taking a long time to be promoted, and losing significant money in those years; or, going to the other extreme, which is to spend an absolute fortune but have high chances of promotion; or, somewhere in the middle – and we went with somewhere in the middle. But that somewhere in the middle still resulted in us losing an average of € 7 million per year in the Belgian second division, where our revenues were € 3 million: so, we were losing well over double our revenues. Most people would say that it is pretty crazy and poor financial responsibility, and I would agree, but the reality is that in the first season we had the fourth or fifth highest budget, despite that complete chaos and craziness.
Q. Isn’t that because the costs of the players and everything which is around that have skyrocketed in the last 20 years? Because the cost of the football players is the main variable.
A. As well as the fact that Clubs are not a “normal” business: they have a higher purpose than normal businesses. The other side of the coin is: I have spoken to people who owns Clubs in Belgium, and they had extremely successful businesses, with turnover of 50 to 100 times what the football club generates, and no one had heard of them because of their businesses: when they bought the football Club and invested tiny amounts relative to their wealth, they suddenly became very famous, and that was very important to those people – it is not important to me, but it is very important for a lot of people who invest in football. So that means that you can handle losing a lot of money, and when that’s the culture, in order to be even vaguely competitive you have to lose a medium amount of money – and that’s part of the problem.
A new challenge for UEFA? The UEC’s proposal to redistribute revenues to training clubs
Q. Can you indicate one positive and one negative development in the European football ecosystem and governance in this last year since the October 2024 UEC conference?
A. A clearly bad thing is that the ECA has rebranded itself, has added to its membership, and is seemingly doing a good job of convincing people that they represent significant swathes of teams in European football, when the reality is that nothing has changed: there is no change to any voting system, there is no change to any governance, there is no change to anything. The new members are literally told “you have no rights, but we will give you the shiny toys” (like the services that we discussed that we can’t offer), “and we will invite you to fancy parties”, and the veneer of inclusiveness appears to be vaguely successful. That’s definitely a bad thing.
I would say a very good thing is Glenn Micallef [European Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport]. He seems to understand what European football is, he seems to understand stakeholders, he seems to understand the background and where we are today. I would say he is a really positive entrant to the world of European football.
Q. Why should a men’s or women’s football Club in Europe decide to become member of the UEC, instead of being member of the EFC, which has now over 800 members, a strong internal structure and a consolidated position in the European football ecosystem?
A. There is an expression in English that is “turkeys voting for Christmas”. As far as I can tell, if you are a Club and you decide to join the EFC, you are a turkey, because you get to have a party and you might get you nails trimmed: as a turkey, you have then ended up voting for Christmas. That’s how I feel about that situation. If you want to try and help your Club in the long term have some sort of financial sustainability, some chances of competing, some chances of success, then the UEC has to be a better long-term bet.
Q. You are in a quite peculiar position, as USG was formerly a member of the ECA network. Do you think it should be possible for Clubs, or desirable, to be members of both associations?
A. We were never an ECA full member, we were part of the ECA network but then we were denied full membership. When we were in February of the year when we were on top of the league, we started asking for membership. It took a long time for them to get back to us, and when they did we thought we would be in, but they replied to us – and this is quite important legally: as we said that we were members of another organization, the UEC, they said that ECA members could not be members of another organization as they don’t allow dual membership. I had a long conversation with Charlie Marshall [ECA CEO], who explained their reasons, and I explained that I wasn’t prepared to leave the UEC, being also very clear that USG was happy to be a part of both groups, and that the UEC was happy for USG to be part of both groups. The ECA was the only unhappy part. I said that, as far as I was concerned, ECA was blocking us from joining. They have maintained legally that we were not blocked by them but blocked by ourselves being a member of another group.
Q. The clash between EFC and UEC has been of public domain in recent years. Would you be open to have a public debate with EFC?
A. Yes, for sure, no problem. I think it is quite clear what we stand for. I think in general they know that it is not clear what they stand for: if you really represented all of these Clubs you would have allowed them to vote. I don’t think it would be a particularly difficult public debate in theory but, it is not something that would be of interest to them. I guess they would argue they don’t need to debate with me, that they have a Memorandum of Understanding with both UEFA and FIFA for the long term, so they can’t just respond to public debate requests from here and there. Just to be clear, I am not requesting one, you asked the question, I didn’t suggest that.
Q. You mentioned UEFA and FIFA and their Memorandum of Understanding with the ECA. On your side, how do you plan to move forward with your interactions with European stakeholders, and notably UEFA, the European Commission and the European Parliament, considering the challenges you have encountered so far in getting a formal recognition (for example by inclusion in the Social Dialogue)? What is the plan to strengthen such relationships, get potential recognition and in this way maybe be more effective?
A. We have an excellent relationship with the European Commission and the European Parliament. I think they have a lot of respect for what we do, and as I said I have a lot of respect for Commissioner Micallef. What we have to do is to present realistic policies that would make European football better, and show what we believe in a formal, practical way. The PDR was the first of them, and I would love it if we had more resources to spend more time on policies and develop them. It is incredibly difficult to develop policies with the resources that we have.
And again, I know that we have been called a protest group before, but that is not what we want to be, and that is not what I think we are: and the way that we show that is by developing realistic policies that can be debated. It is not just about simply saying “you are bad” – that doesn’t do anything, there is no benefit in that. We need to show to various stakeholders that we are a pragmatic, positive group that wants to move things forward, rather than a negative complaining group that doesn’t come up with anything and just says that something is not good.
The impact of the revenue redistribution proposal
Q. Back to the PDR proposal: did you discuss it with the other stakeholders and did you get support, also considering that the PDR could introduce some harmonization of training compensation systems which are now regulated by the FIFA and domestic frameworks (different across Europe)? How was this taken by the other stakeholders and do you see any possibility that they will embrace this proposal and push it forward?
A. The first thing to say is that the PDR is designed to be on top of the existing solidarity framework -not a replacement, but an addition. In terms of feedback that we have had, we have been pleasantly surprised by the real lack of negative feedback. The response has been really positive – that, yes, this would result in good outcomes for European football: teams would be incentivized to train young players better and teams would know their cash flows better, and it would be an annual, repeating item rather than a one-off thing.
Now it is about waiting for the next cycle’s negotiations to see if we can include it in conversations, when the conversations are happening – and this is part of the problem with the EFC and the way things are run in the governance of European football: often the press release comes out telling you what has been decided. There is no conversation around the process how it is decided. There is nothing in public before saying that those are the options that will be tried and decided upon. It’s literally that one day UEFA and EFC jointly publish a statement saying for example how solidarity payments will work, that’s it. Now, that doesn’t sound great, but what we need to do at the UEC is to keep the PDR on the agenda and in the public domain, so that hopefully UEFA thinks this is a very good idea and will include it in the conversations. To be clear, we also strongly believe that the PDR mechanism should apply to the FIFA Club World Cup as well.
Q.Would the PDR not add financial costs on top of both solidarity payments and the existing training compensation mechanisms?
A. For the PDR, the money comes from the Champions League teams essentially, and it’s my strong opinion that Champions League teams make way too much money from the Champions League. So I have no issue with that whatsoever. Europa League teams, Conference League teams, teams that are knocked out of the qualifiers, non-participating Clubs – they would all receive money under the PDR. Champions League teams would not, but that to me is a positive both for everything else that we have spoken of for the PDR and also for competitive balance, because that moves the Champions League teams closer towards the non-Champions League teams. It can only be positive for competitive balance.
Q. To conclude on a more personal note: we all have some sweet memories of how we first got in touch with football in our life – what is your sweet memory, and how does it relate to the work you do at USG and UEC?
A. For me, the bond that I have with Union Saint-Gilloise is much greater than the bond I have ever had with any other football team. Since 2018 I have been to the vast majority of matches, the only exception being the pandemic: winning the Belgian cup was amazing, but at the same time we had a game a few days later and we were trying to win the league, so I didn’t really necessarily enjoy it the way that I could. The title win is the best day of my 8-year old son’s life. It was incredibly special and it is still incredibly special now, I feel a great sense of achievement and satisfaction and pleasure, just thinking back to the amount of work that has gone in, the number of good people that I hired at USG and who got to see that day, and the supporters. There was a famous cafe owner in Brussels who was 90-year old: he was a Union fan and his cafe, full of USG stuff, is in the Anderlecht area of the city. In those 90 years Anderlecht won 34 titles in the Belgian league and we had not won any. He just died recently but he finally got to see that happen, which must have been pretty magical.
I know it is not exactly the answer to the question you asked, but that day, and afterwards, is just so far ahead of anything else that has happened in football in my experience that it has to be the answer.
Q. Then we can say that day will be the sweet memory of many people for a long time.
A. I would say so.