Is Rupert Murdoch plotting a global club football summer tournament from 2015?

The Guardian are reporting that the media mogul has started work on putting together a 16-team tournament featuring the cream of European club football, with games to be played across the globe.

While the 39^th game idea never got off the ground, this tournament, because of the people behind it, may. According to the Guardian duo of Mark Sweney and Owen Gibson News International supremo Rupert Murdoch is plotting to create a summer tournament of club football that they compare to F1 in its travelling circus structure. With the ‘normal’ season of August to May tied down by Uefa, the summer offers a window for clubs to make money and almost all the big names now take off to Asia, the US or the Middle East to play friendlies and generate some extra revenue and fans. Murdoch now wants to formalize that and take clubs like Manchester United and Chelsea, plus the other big clubs in Europe’s top leagues, and pit them against each other in a 16-team tournament. The twist is that the games will be played across the globe, with places like LA and Shanghai cited in the article. The report goes on to say that the tournament would run for 10 years, from 2015, and that all the games would be broadcast on Murdoch’s channels like Sky and Fox. A number of cities have already been approached by Murdoch’s people about hosting games but the paper stresses that the proposals are at an ‘early stage’. We can definitely see the clubs going for it. Will the powers that be at Uefa be able to stop it and how will the clubs excluded from the 16 feel? One to watch we suspect.