Now the Turks want to get slice of new European Cup

The new European Rugby Champions’ Cup is preparing for take-off with the airline who signed Lionel Messi during their sponsorship of FC Barcelona and Manchester United.
Turkish Airlines are in negotiations over a multi-million pound deal to move into a different footballing arena.
“They are very interested in rugby and being involved in the first Champions’ Cup,” a leading source told The Rugby Paper.
“There’s a lot of interest from a lot of brands known world-wide. They illustrate how the game has gone global.”
The new club-driven body running Europe from next season, the European Professional Club Rugby, plan to announce their four elite commercial ‘partners’ before the end of the domestic season next month.
Airlines are investing increasingly vast sums in sport but none has yet ventured into rugby. Qatar Airways’ £20m-a-year sponsorship of Barcelona and Aerolfot’s five-year deal with Manchester United, said to be worth something similar, have prompted Turkey’s national carrier to look at new fields.
They are also understood to have been in the market to become title sponsors of the Pro 12 following the decision of the Dutch bank, RaboDirect, not to renew their three-year contract once the season finishes.
Instead of its Union-controlled predecessor, European Rugby Cup Ltd., the three new competitions will be run by a five-man executive consisting of an independent chairman, a director-general and one representative from each of the three domestic Leagues – the Aviva Premiership, Top 14 and Pro 12.
The long overdue peace deal came almost two years after the Anglo-French clubs fired the opening shots. As revealed by The Rugby Paper in May 2012, they gave the statutory two years’ notice to quit.
“We’d been warning ERC long before then that there were serious issues over the unfair distribution of funds and the tournament’s commercial value,” one English club chief executive said.   “We kept warning them but still they didn’t see it coming.”
PETER JACKSON