Pereira da Costa rejects Nacional’s plan: “Portugal isn’t England” | OneFootball

In statements to the newspaper O JOGO, FC Porto CFO José Pedro Pereira da Costa, who represents the club on the Board of Directors of Liga Centralização, made the dragons’ position clear in the process of centralizing television rights. “FC Porto has been involved in this process with a sense of responsibility, institutional loyalty, and based on assumptions of rationality that do not jeopardize the competitiveness of Portuguese football, the sustainability of the clubs that contribute most to enhancing the competition and, naturally, the UEFA ranking,” he began, before reinforcing the blue-and-whites’ position regarding the centralization proposal put forward by Rui Alves.

“What we cannot accept is an attempt to import, uncritically, distribution models applied in England, France, or Spain, as if the Portuguese reality were comparable to those markets. The president of Nacional, without intending any disrespect toward the club’s membership base, wants to compare realities that are not comparable. Clubs in those countries have different demographics, different membership bases, incomparably larger domestic markets, and a very strong regional identification with their clubs, reflected in very significant attendances at their matches, which, I repeat with no disrespect, Nacional does not have,” he said, alluding to what André Villas-Boas had already said, pointing to an average stadium occupancy of around 50 percent for the island club.

Therefore, for FC Porto, it is “impossible” to accept distribution criteria “such as those Mr. Rui Alves wants to defend.” Centralization in Portugal, in Porto’s view, “will only make sense if it respects the Portuguese reality, the actual weight of each club in creating value, audience figures, membership size, international reach, and contribution to the overall competitiveness of Portuguese football,” he continued, recalling that UEFA “uses similar criteria in distributing Champions League funds, in which only 27.5% is shared equally.” “In the 2024/25 season, the ratio between the club with the highest revenues [PSG] and the one with the lowest [Slovan Bratislava] was about eight times, reflecting the better sporting performance and commercial value of the clubs,” he recalled.

For José Pereira da Costa, Nacional’s president, by taking this “extreme position, is not only disrespecting the work that has been carried out within Liga Centralização, but is also introducing noise and instability into the process.” In the Porto CFO’s opinion, such an attitude “will only devalue the product that Liga Centralização has been trying to maximize, making the figures ‘publicized’ by Mr. Rui Alves impossible to achieve, because the implied overall value of the rights will be a fiction,” he said.

In that scenario, Pereira da Costa guarantees that FC Porto “will certainly find alternative ways to market other audiovisual assets individually in order to preserve the value of the television rights it currently receives.” In conclusion, the executive says that FC Porto “will not accept any distribution key” that departs from the principles discussed and approved within the Liga Centralização process. “If the path advocated by Nacional is followed, FC Porto will no longer continue to collaborate in the centralization process and will fight politically and legally against whatever model is imposed. Anyone who claims to support a collective solution cannot, at the same time, propose criteria that destroy the economic rationality that makes that solution possible,” he said.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇵🇹 here.