Europe's new deal has simply sold the fans cheap

That great football statesman Peter Kenyon hailed the deal as "a historic day", so I immediately thought, where's the catch, and plunged into the small print. And, believe me, it isn't exactly the deal of the century.

The clubs have settled for a pot of £130million over the next six years to cover World Cups and European Championships.

That's a maximum of £3,000 a day per player; great compensation for say Andriy Shevchenko and Michael Ballack who both get paid six times that. But then maths never was Kenyon's strong point, or he wouldn't go on telling us that Chelsea will soon break even.

Much of that money will go on insurance, anyway. Among the weeds of this deal, the extent of the clubs' failure to dent UEFA or FIFA becomes most apparent in the treatment of futile friendlies.

Such games that require players to travel out of the club's continent are restricted to one per year, but same continent friendlies will still continue to disrupt the league timetable.

So pushing off to Belarus for a riveting friendly against Andorra will still take priority for Arsenal's Alexander Hleb over the most important match in the club's calendar. Some victory! Nor have cast-iron guarantees been given about the African Nations' Cup that is currently weakening so many Premier League sides. There is no agreement to move it to the summer.

The most that has been promised is Inflated egos talks to bring the tournament "closer" to a summer date from 2016.

The reduction in the maximum number of countries in qualifying groups for the European Championship finals to six will also leave in a lot of minnows, whose presence merely adds to fixture congestion.

In return for what is little more than a mess of pottage, and moving international games from Wednesdays to Tuesdays, the G14 have agreed to disband and be replaced by an amorphous grouping of more than 100 clubs drawn from all 53 of UEFA's national associations.

In that way, the power of the elite clubs is diluted and UEFA president Michel Platini has succeeded in castrating the one cartel who threatened the freedom of UEFA and FIFA to do what they like.

But does any of this matter? I am sure quite a lot of fans, and almost all football journalists, will echo Paul Daniels and say, not a lot.

But those of us who are essentially club fans, who don't appreciate paying fancy prices for season tickets to help pay the ever-increasing wage demands of players who are then taken away with monotonous regularity to participate in international games, from which they often return injured, will think it a crying shame the pass has been sold so cheaply.