When Porto beat Monaco to win the Champions League in 2004, it felt like the start of a new era. And for José Mourinho, it was. He had won the Uefa Cup the previous season, but that success in Gelsenkirchen was his springboard to points records at Chelsea, a treble with Internazionale and his titanic struggles with Pep Guardiola when he was at Real Madrid. For two decades he has sulked and pouted his way around Europe, and for at least half of that time he was remarkably successful. But for European football as a whole that final marked the end of something.
In the previous 20 years, the competition had been a genuinely pan-European affair, with winners coming from nine different countries; in the 20 years since, there has been only one finalist from outside the big four of Spain, England, Germany and Italy – and that was Paris Saint-Germain, whose financial clout has very little to do with the general position of French football.
In part that is the result of the familiar capitalist cycle. A club wins games so generates more interest so generates more revenue so can afford better players and so wins more games. The advent of the Champions League and its gradual expansion to include first two, then three, then four and from next season five or even six teams from certain countries has created the conditions in which that spiral is almost certain to take hold. When the competition was a straight unseeded knockout, even the very best sides were occasionally eliminated after playing only two games. And in part it’s been about the increasing attractiveness of the game to oligarchs and states with a reputation to launder.
But there has also been a thumb on the scales. Using the threat of a breakaway super league to apply pressure on Uefa, the elite clubs have forced concessions that have increased their revenues and so helped shore up their hegemony.
Michel Platini, for all his faults, at least seemed genuinely to understand there was an issue with competitive balance in European football. When he resigned as Uefa’s president in 2016, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich took advantage of the power vacuum to force through a measure that distributed 30% of Champions League revenues according to performances in the competition over the previous 10 years.
That means that insurgent clubs, as well as being disadvantaged by the coefficient – Newcastle, for instance, were in pot four of seeds for last season’s group stage – were also guaranteed only about £2m from those historic payments, whereas Manchester City were guaranteed £30m. Without playing particularly badly, Newcastle finished fourth in the group and went out, improving their coefficient and historical ranking only slightly. City, in a far easier group, finished top, and so improved their position for next season and beyond.
Leicester found themselves in a similar position and Aston Villa will too, despite the changed format next season. But before anyone feels too sorry for them, it should be borne in mind that from 2018-19 teams finishing fourth in the major leagues were given automatic entry into the group stage rather than having to go through a playoff round.
But still that wasn’t enough for Europe’s rapacious elite. Still they wanted more. They demanded a rejig of the Champions League format to remove even the sliver of jeopardy that exists in the group stage. The result is the Swiss system that begins next season: even more games, even more money, even less jeopardy.
The consequence of that concentration of wealth at one end of the game can be seen in the way competition in the countries who dominate the Champions League has been obliterated over the past 20 years. In each of those big four leagues, the biggest clubs have come increasingly to dominate: Bayern had won 11 Bundesliga titles in a row before Bayer Leverkusen took their crown. Juventus won nine in a row in Italy. Real Madrid – who face Borussia Dortmund in next Saturday’s final – and Barcelona have won all but two of the past 20 La Liga titles. Even in the Premier League, where the domestic broadcast rights deal ensured a degree of parity for a time, Manchester City have won six of the past seven.
That in turn has had knock-on effects. Football itself has become more attacking. The elite dominate domestically to the extent they barely have to bother defending, and turn out to be ill-equipped to do so in the later rounds of the Champions League when they face other elite clubs and a rare serious challenge.
That’s why dramatic three‑goal swings have become at least semi-familiar in recent seasons. Mourinho, the herald of the new age, now seems a relic. In this modern world of football as entertainment commodity, who now would focus on spoiling and defending?
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In that sense, the content has improved. Football has never been so popular. But the benefits of that are disproportionately felt at that elite level as a global audience across the world effectively chooses one of the handful of super clubs, which in turn become increasingly detached from the communities they initially served.
Whether that matters is very much an issue of perspective. If football is a business, then perhaps it makes sense to gather the best players and coaches at a small number of clubs and have them face each other regularly (that, certainly, is the logic behind franchised Twenty20 leagues in cricket).
Perhaps only doomed nostalgists care that the sense of a club as something more than a commercial vehicle, as a social institution with responsibilities whose actions have cultural resonance, feel uneasy at that – although it’s worth asking also how players will develop without a thriving pyramid, and also exactly what the product is; matches, after all, are not exhibitions by one side, but contests between two.
That’s why Wednesday’s Europa League final felt so refreshing. It was, as Atalanta’s Gian Piero Gasperini said, a game that showed “there is still scope for ideas and it doesn’t have to come down to cold, hard money”. But at the elite level, football is increasingly about cold, hard money.
Greed has whittled potential winners of the Champions League to a small handful. The only question is how far that process will go.
