- The Observer
25.08.19 11
Inside football
Jonathan
Wilson
Continent’s big four may falter but their
striving for super-league is ever stronger
Did you feel it? The
great disturbance in the force, as
though millions of voices cried out
in hope? Last weekend, something
remarkable happened : none of
the champions of Europe’s big
fi ve leagues won (a statistic that
admittedly loses some of its potency
when it is acknowledged that Serie A
hadn’t started: Juventus kicked off
their Serie A campaign yesterday
at Parma).
Last season was the fi rst time that
each of the big fi ve leagues had been
retained, but here was the little man
striking back: Barcelona lost , Paris
Saint-Germain lost, Manchester City
drew , Bayern drew. Do you hear the
people sing?
Well, no, not really. The people
have been remarkably silent about a
weekend of upsets, largely because
the people know that it almost
certainly doesn’t matter.
City may have drawn with Spurs
but they had 30 shots (excluding
Gabriel Jesus’s disallowed late
winner) to three ( including Harry
Kane’s wildly speculative lump from
inside his own half); in all respects
but the result it was a performance of
awesome domination.
Bayern were sloppy in drawing
with Hertha Berlin but still managed
17 shots to six. Barça were disjointed
and missing several key players
in their 1-0 defeat by Athletic in
Bilbao, but still had the better of
the xG (expected goals). Only PSG, a
sportswashing project turned toxic
when it lost sight of whose ego it
was meant to be fl uffi ng, suffered a
defeat that was a clear refl ection of
the play, going down 2-1 at Rennes.
Yet each of the fi ve champions
remain odds-on to defend their
titles again and the price on all fi ve
to do so is between 6 -1 and 13 -2.
To put that in context,
Bournemouth are 16 -1 to beat City at
home today : it’s almost three times
less likely that a decent mid-table
side will win a one-off game against
the champions than that all fi ve will
successfully defend their titles. Little
wonder the super-clubs outside the
Premier League are beginning to tire
of their domestic leagues.
The situation of City and the
Premier League is a little different
to that of the other four. City are
dominant because they have an
exceptional coach and have invested
the resources of their owners with
almost unprecedented effi ciency
(the scale and providence of those
resources is another issue).
Much the same could be said
of Liverpool, their only probable
challengers. Both are, of course, to
an extent sustained by the grossly
inequitable distribution of football’s
wealth, an issue that the plight of
Bury and Bolton has cast in urgent
light, and that distribution will only
become more unequal within the
Premier League as the new overseas
TV rights deal comes into effect. But
City and Liverpool are in positions
of strength largely because theyyears is scandalously bad given their
fi nancial advantages, seem to have
accepted years ago.
Of course the non-Premier League
elite like the idea of a super-league,
with the proposals to transform the
Champions League into four groups
of eight, perhaps with protected
places, a fairly obvious stepping
stone towards that.
English clubs do not seem
especially keen, understandably
given how the Premier League model
is so lucrative. English fans, by and
large, seem appalled by the prospect
but England has always been a little
different. English football has always
supported more professional clubs
than elsewhere, had a sense of them
as hubs of their community, and the
notion that a small handful of big
teams should dominate is relatively
new. Manchester United, the most
successful English side, have won
only 16.7% of all league titles:
compare that to Bayern (50%), Real
Madrid (37.5%) or Juventus (30.4%).
Historically, there has been greater
fl uidity at the top of English football
than in any other major league: the
top two sides of two decades ago
aren’t even the best sides in their
respective cities now, a situation
almost unthinkable elsewhere.
But there is a certain grim logic to
a super-league. What, after all, is the
point of super-clubs collecting seven,
eight, nine league titles in a row, even
when they’re not playing particularly
well? The Champions League already
skews competition because its
rewards are so out of sync with what
is available domestically. Porto’s
defeat in this season’s preliminaries
has devastated their fi nancial
planning. Or take Cyprus, where no
team had retained the title in 12 years
before Apoel reached the Champions
League quarter-fi nals in 2012:
infl ated by the revenue that brought,
they have won the championship
every year since. Almost everywhere
but the Premier League, the status
quo cannot hold.
This is football in a globalised
culture, everything hollowed out
to service the elite, the super-clubs
from western Europe who draw
support from across the world. In
the fi nal rounds of the Champions
League, the spectacle and drama is
extraordinary. But for smaller clubs
the future is bleak.
Do you hear the people sing? Not
much. Not any more.Opening fi xture frustration
for PSG’s Kylian Mbappé
(above) and Barça’s Antoine
Griezmann but their clubs
remain domestic favourites
and their hegemony is
very different from that of
Manchester City in EnglandWhat is the point
of super-clubs
collecting league
titles when they
are not playing
particularly well?
have got the football side of their
operations right.
And that’s what is so alarming
about what is going on elsewhere.
PSG have been distracted by the
continuing Neymar saga. Juve have
installed Maurizio Sarri, whose
idiosyncratic methods do not seem a
natural fi t to a distended squad built
around Cristiano Ronaldo. Barça are
in unconvincing transition. Bayern
have, in Niko Kovac, kept on a coach
about whom nobody, from the club
hierarchy to the fans, seems certain.
There is reason to be sceptical
about all four and yet all remain
overwhelming favourites. Barça
at least have one rival of
equivalent fi nancial might;
the others dwarf potential
competitors, for all that
people wonder whether
Napoli or Dortmund
might have their season.
In the past seven years, Barça,
PSG, Bayern and Juve have won 25
of 28 possible league titles. Max
Allegri was let go by Juve having led
them to fi ve scudetti in a row , four
of them doubles, because Europe
has become the only testing ground- something Real Madrid, whose
record of two league titles in 11
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