UEFA plot four-team mini tournaments

UEFA chiefs are planning four-team mini-tournaments to settle the Champions League and Europa League.

European football chiefs will hold a series of teleconferences on Tuesday to confirm their response to the coronavirus.

Uefa has already called off this week’s planned European games and is certain to take the decision to postpone Euro 2020 for 12 months.

That will provide space in June and July for domestic leagues to be played to a finish if the virus is sufficiently contained for football to resume.

But with Uefa hoping to be able to play next season as near to normal as possible, president Aleksander Ceferin is ready to give the green light to the plan to find a novel way of determining this term’s winners.

The Uefa plan foresees the remaining last 16 ties being played as normal once football is allowed to return.

Then the last eight ties will be drawn as one-off games, either with the team drawn first having the home advantage or on neutral soil.

That will get teams to the final four, which is when the mini-tournaments will come in.

The idea is that the four semi-finalists in the Champions League will travel to Istanbul, with the four Europa League sides going to the scheduled final city of Gdansk.

Both tournaments would be played to a finish over four days in successive weeks, with two one-off semi-finals played back to back and the final between the winners.

Uefa feels that such a concept, while far from ideal, would provide a winner and be acceptable to broadcasters while also freeing dates for the remaining domestic league games to be played out.

Issues such as whether fans will be allowed in to the venues will be determined in the coming weeks if the proposed play-off scheme is agreed after Tuesday’s discussions.

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But with nobody able to provide any certainty on when sport will be able to resume, Uefa recognises all these ideas could be rendered redundant by events outside football’s control.