Celtic manager Gordon Strachan believes the authority of world football's two most powerful organisations, FIFA and UEFA, will eventually be ended by rich businessmen.
"There will be a new structure, a new body," Strachan told the BBC's Inside Sport programme late on Monday. "The powers that be, the businessmen coming into football now, will say 'forget FIFA, forget UEFA, we're so powerful we'll have three (European) leagues with the best 60 clubs.
"I think that's the way it has got to go."
Strachan added that FIFA, world football's governing body and UEFA, which has governed European soccer since 1954, will have no choice but to go along with such a development.
"It will be that powerful that I think FIFA would have to go along and say 'we better let them get on with it because they'll just keep the players away from international level'."
As a result of those changes, Celtic and Rangers, who have dominated Scottish football for more than a century, could start playing the major English clubs on a regular basis.
Over the years plans to integrate the Old Firm as Rangers and Celtic are known, into the English league have been regularly mooted and thwarted, but Strachan believes they will start playing each other in a new European League.
"I think in years to come there will be a European league with 54 or 60 clubs," he told the BBC. "That's the way everybody will get round it."
© 2024 Rediff.com -