Russia Stripped of Champions League Final Due to Ukraine Crisis, UEFA Pick Paris
Russian and Ukrainian teams will play their home games on neutral grounds.
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UEFA have decided that the Champions League this season will be played in Paris instead of St Petersburg in Russia. This will be the first time France host the final of the UEFA Champions League since 2006 and it will be played at the Stade de France, in the northern Paris. That year, Arsenal and Barcelona had played the final, with the Spanish giants winning the title.
The UEFA President, Aleksander Ceferin, had travelled to the Paris on Thursday to meet with France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, to put the finishing touches on the agreement, reported the New York Times.
“The UEFA Executive Committee decided to relocate the final of the 2021/22 UEFA Men’s Champions League from Saint Petersburg to Stade de France in Saint-Denis. The game will be played as initially scheduled on Saturday 28 May.”
“At today’s meeting, the UEFA Executive Committee also decided that Russian and Ukrainian clubs and national teams competing in UEFA competitions will be required to play their home matches at neutral venues until further notice,” UEFA’s statement read on Friday.
The move comes after UEFA strongly condemned the Russia’s invasion of neighbours Ukraine on Thursday. This is third consecutive year that the UEFA Champions League final is being moved, with the last two being shifted to Portugal due to the coronavirus pandemic. The final in Paris also will be the first time since the outbreak of the coronavirus that the game will be played in a full stadium which can seat 80,000 fans.
The final, scheduled for 28 May, was to be played in St Petersburg in a stadium built for the 2018 World Cup, and financed by the Russian energy giant Gazprom, a major UEFA sponsor.
UEFA have also decided, in an extraordinary meeting of the Executive Council, that any games slated for Russia and Ukraine that is under their control will be relocated, whether club or of national teams. Currently, a decision like that affects only a single club match - Spartak Moscow’s next home game in the second-tier Europa League.
The UEFA’s move to punish Russia passes the buck on to world football’s governing body, FIFA, to move a 2022 World Cup qualifying game that is slated to be played in Moscow in March. Meanwhile, the football federations of Poland, Czech Republic and Sweden, have written to FIFA urging them to ban Russia from hosting playoff games for the 2022 World Cup qualification process. The federations have asked FIFA to find alternate solutions for sites that are not in Russia.
Poland is scheduled to play Russia in Moscow on 24 March and if the hosts win the tie, they would host the winner of the game between the Czechs and Sweden in a match to decide one of Europe’s final places in the World Cup in Qatar.
“The military escalation that we are observing entails serious consequences and considerably lower safety for our national football teams and official delegations,” the federations wrote in a joint statement.
FIFA President Infantino said the that letter will be looked at "as a matter of urgency" and added that it can "take a decision at any time".
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