Compromise isn’t working, but the cash is rolling in
It was compromise, fueled by greed, that led to this, the ransacking of one of soccer’s most treasured competitions in an effort to create something truly super. What UEFA and Europe’s biggest clubs couldn’t comprehend is how terrific the European Cup already was.
The stain of money is all over the newfangled Champions League, which in its first three weeks offered plenty of everything, good and bad, but nothing that could satisfy “Super League” claims. Perhaps that’s ahead, in the next phase, once all the minnows have been weeded out and all that’s left are the Man Uniteds, Barcelonas and AC Milans.
That is what the big clubs want; it’s their maneuvering toward a Super League that forced UEFA’s hand, devising the compromise that has led to what now exists: a “Champions” league in name only, with a fraction of the skill, style or interest that its architects anticipated.
The G-14, a collaboration of Europe’s biggest clubs, envisioned a league for the game’s giants. UEFA, its hold on the sport growing tenuous, insisted that competitors earn their berths and the entire continent be included. The result is something neither the big clubs nor UEFA wants, a watered-down “Super League” that has too many non-champions to serve the purpose its predecessor has carried out since 1956.
Schedule congestion – two games per week – has been rewarded with subpar play and injury; attendance at all but the biggest showdowns, or at the smallest clubs, has been bleak; and the proliferation of Champions League games on television has diluted its impact rather than created excitement for the enterprise.
“This first stage of the competition doesn’t interest me,” said Johan Cruyff, who won three European Cups as a player at Ajax Amsterdam and another as Barcelona coach. “This has changed just to make more money. The competition has been decaffeinated. It only really starts in March.”
There’s a lot of cash out there, so nobody’s too worried about the problems. The participating clubs will share in most of the 828 million Swiss francs – about $540 million – raised solely through TV rights and sponsorship. The champion could earn as much as much as $22 million, plus gate revenues and proceeds from concessions, parking and merchandising.
A risk of saturation
FIFA is concerned about the amount of money coursing through European soccer’s veins, about spiraling transfer fees and salaries, about packed schedules that force top players beyond their limits, about what the new Champions League represents and the harm all of it could cause the sport.
“There is a risk of saturation in top-level football, [and] transfer fees are 10 times higher than they were a decade ago …,” Michel Zen-Ruffinen, FIFA’s secretary general, told a SPORTEL conference in Monte Carlo on television and sports. “It means FIFA will have to take some fairly drastic action.”
The Champions League, Zen-Ruffinen charged, “is a fiasco” that has hurt soccer’s value and its popularity. For every Barcelona-Arsenal or Milan-Chelsea, there are a half-dozen Porto-Olympiakoses, Spartak Moscow-Sparta Pragues and Sturm Graz-Croatia Zagrebs, and nobody seems to care.
Real Madrid lured only 15,000 to the Bernabeu Stadium for its Group E rout of Molde. Fiorentina couldn’t sell out for Arsenal, nor could Barcelona for Fiorentina. Bayern Munich filled only half its Olympic Stadium for PSV Eindhoven and Valencia. Even Rosenborg, a relative dwarf, watched its attendance dwindle when Borussia Dortmund visited.
And FIFA fears, Zen-Ruffinen said, that the mass coverage the competition is receiving on European television is wearing down fans and driving viewers away.
“The saturation of matches on television has only diluted interest in an extraordinary competition, and as a consequence, the UEFA Cup does not interest anyone …,” he said. “We very much regret this development. It’s not in anyone’s best interest. We want the television channels to reserve certain days for football, so there are more matches on one day and then football-free periods to renew viewers’ appetites for the game.”
Silvio Berlusconi, president the last 13 years of AC Milan and driving force behind Media Partners’ plan for a Super League, also is unhappy; he’d like to do away with the compromise Champions League and reestablish plans for a full-scale European league.
“My project is more advanced and more integrated, with a First Division reserved for the big clubs with large followings who can attract big television audiences, and a Second Division for the other clubs,” said Berlusconi, a media magnate and former Italian prime minister. “I think that this arrangement is only a transitional formula until we arrive at a real and proper European league playing on Wednesdays, with national championships taking place on Saturdays.”
How such a structure would differ from the Champions League, aside from demoting the little clubs to a lesser tournament, he does not say. Speculation during pre-compromise discussions among the G-14 had the Super League teams abandoning their domestic competitions or fielding entirely different teams.
Disparity between domestic teams
It sounds like Berlusconi favors the former, although he hasn’t come out and said so. His chief criticism of the current set-up, he says, is that schedule congestion is harming Champions League teams’ chances in their domestic leagues. Why would that change under a Super League umbrella unless the domestic games were abandoned?
“We have to change something, because now there is a disparity between the top teams playing for the [Italian] title,” whined Berlusconi, whose club claimed the Serie A crown last season when it had no European obligations. “Last year we had the advantage; this time it is with Inter [which didn’t qualify for the Champions League or UEFA Cup].
“I believe we need to change this situation because it creates privileged conditions, it favors those clubs not participating in the Champions League and falsifies the national league.”
Everybody has something to complain about. Coaches of clubs in the UEFA Cup moan about the addition of eliminated Champions League clubs along the way. All of the qualifying third-round losers advanced into the No. 2 competition, and the third-place teams from the first group stage will go into the UEFA Cup’s third round.
“I think Europe and the competition we’re in is a joke. It’s an absolute farce,” said Leeds United coach David O’Leary, whose team knocked off Partizan Belgrade – a Champions League dropout – in the first round of the UEFA Cup. “It sounds to me that UEFA wants certain teams to keep winning these European tournaments. It’s like saying, ‘If you don’t do well in the Champions League, there’s something you can go and dominate.'”
It doesn’t make sense, he says, and his fellow coaches agree. None of it really makes sense – even Chelsea coach Gianluca Vialli, who got into the Champions League with England’s No. 3 team, acknowledges it is so. He won a European Cup while playing at Juventus and understands how special that is and what the competition means, or has meant.
As a non-champion, he admits, Chelsea doesn’t belong, but what do you do? The third-place team in England is worth more than the Belgian champion, or the Swiss champion, and that is the only thing that matters anymore.
Call it the Champion$ League.
by Soccer America senior editor Scott French