Section:GDN 1N PaGe:43 Edition Date:190829 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 28/8/2019 17:58 cYanmaGentaYellowb
Thursday 29 Aug ust 2019 The Guardian •
43Share of the spoils
Making elite clubs
even richer does not
sound like progress
for European game
‘ E
urope,” Sir Alex Ferguson said,
actually a little before Manchester
United’s 1999 success in the
Champions League helped to bring
a knighthood his way, “ought to
be the cherry on the cake. No one
wants it to be the whole cake – that
would spoil everything.” Ferguson
was responding, a couple of decades ago, not only to
non-champions being allowed into the hallowed event- he would mellow on seeing United go all the way in
Europe after fi nishing second behind Arsenal in 1998 –
but to Uefa tweaking the format once again to introduce
a double group stage involving more matches. In the
event that modifi cation proved short-lived, lasting only
until 200 2-0 3, though there are still infl uential voices - the former United CEO David Gill among them – who
consider a second mini-league a more attractive and
competitive prospect than the present last 16, where
group winners usually fi nd it easy to reach the last eight.
Everyone has their favourite version of the
competition that started out as the European Cup.
Some stubbornly believe it was better when restricted
to national champions only, ignoring the huge fi nancial
gains and not inconsiderable drama that has played out
over the past 20 years or so. Others feel it is just about
perfect at the moment, with the right balance struck
between commitments at home and in Europe, and
from an English point of view the seeding for to day’s
group stage draw appears to bear that out. Three Premier
League teams take their place in pot one, with Liverpool
and Chelsea joining Manchester City by virtue of the
Uefa trophies claimed last season.
With four English sides contesting the two European
fi nals, and Spurs in with Real Madrid in pot two as a
result, last season could hardly have gone any better
for Premier League clubs, despite providing the only
title race in Europe’s top leagues worthy of the name.
England boasts a glamorous, competitive and above all
lucrative league competition, with leading clubs using
their wealth to make signifi cant strides in Europe.W
hile that might be a source of
frustration for supporters of
Bolton and Bury, it has not
gone unnoticed in Europe
either, with downtrodden
fans unsurprised to hear
that moves have been afoot
to ringfence bigger clubs’
revenues at the expense of smaller ones. Because the
change to the Champions League format for 1991-92
was basically a response to the threat of a breakaway by
big names across Europe, Uefa has found itself across
a similar barrel at regular intervals since. The problem
now is that too much of the money is in England and
too little interest resides in the lop sided leagues around
Europe. It is no accident that the strident European
Club Association wishing to reconfi gure the Champions
League to provide twice as many matches is led by
Andrea Agnelli of Juventus, and the logic behind his
proposals for groups of eight teams rather than four, and
automatic requalifi cation for established Champions
League clubs whatever their domestic league placing,
is depressingly simple to spot. A Champions League
thus confi gured would be a European Super League just
waiting for the name.
Fortunately, in the face of evidence that no one
actually wants this apart from the handful of powerful
sides who appear to have Uefa’s ear, talks between the
ECA and Uefa’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, have just
been put on hold. Nothing was going to change before
2024 anyway, but now there will be a pause for a rethink.
Not everyone agrees with Ferguson that European
football should be the cherry or the cake – some would
like it to be the bread and butter – though it is not easy to
see how that can happen without hardship and wastage
among the majority of clubs left behind.
It is diffi cult to make the case for the status
quo without sounding like a nationalist or an
anti-progressive, though it is
debatable whether making a couple of
dozen clubs infi nitely richer than they
are already really counts as progress.
If the acting Bundesliga president,
Reinhard Rauball, can speak out
against the ECA initiative, when as
president of Dortmund he must be
as tired as everyone else of Bayern’s
supremacy, he deserves hearing. “The
Bundesliga has the highest attendance
fi gures in Europe, more than 42,000
on average, and we don’t want to destroy it with one
decision,” Rauball said. “We have to make it clear that
the national league is the most important.”
In parochial terms, Liverpool would never have been
able to give City such a run for their money last season
had they been obliged to play a 14-game group stage,
although the eventual champions would have been
operating under the same handicap. The quality of
Premier League competition could only suff er, and an
emerging team such as Tottenham would have found
it much tougher to last the pace. Then again, what the
ECA is saying to the big teams is that you don’t have to
keep fl ogging yourself domestically, you can be in the
Champions League every year.
Yet think of Liverpool and their six European titles,
four of them as English champions, the other two won
in spite of uncertainty and eff ort in the Premier League.
Would anyone on Merseyside really want a cessation of
hostilities on the home front, or, perhaps worse, the next
European prize to arrive with an asterisk?Paul Wilson
Some
would like
European
football
to be the
bread and
butter▲ Liverpool’s name
is engraved on the
Champions League
trophy after they beat
Spurs in Madrid in May
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