Greed wins in Europe’s new pecking order
How the mighty have fallen.
Those were the words that briefly came to mind on Tuesday evening as Celtic’s players, beaten 2-0 by Hapoel Be’er Sheva on an arduous night in Israel, joined their supporters in punching the air in triumph at a 5-4 aggregate victory that took them through to the Champions League group stage for the first time in three years.
Not for long, though. If Celtic have fallen, even since the not-sodistant days under Neil Lennon and previously Martin O’Neill, let alone since the days when the ‘‘Lisbon Lions’’ ruled Europe under Jock Stein almost 50 years ago, then it is because European football has failed them and clubs of similar standing.
Ajax, another of European football’s great names, missed out on the group stage altogether, as did Steaua Bucharest, another former winner. Red Star Belgrade did not even make it as far as the play-off round and neither, unusually, did Olympiacos.
For clubs outside the game’s new self-appointed, self-perpetuating, self-interested elite, Champions League qualification has become an ordeal and, thanks to the latest capitulation by Uefa yesterday, it is about to become an awful lot tougher.
Of the many terrifying things about the latest act of vandalism inflicted on the European football landscape, perhaps the most troubling of all is the suggestion that it could have been much worse.
Make no mistake, though. The changes announced by Uefa were bad news not just for Celtic, Ajax, Olympiacos and Red Star Belgrade but for anyone who despairs of the domination of European football by a small group of rich, immensely powerful, commercially obsessed clubs from Spain, Germany, England and Italy.
From 2018-19, the four strongest leagues - at present La Liga, the Bundesliga, the Premier League and Serie A, in that order - will be guaranteed half of the 32 places in the Champions League group stage, with teams from another 51 Uefa associations fighting over the remaining 16 spots.
The rich are only going to get richer now that the competition is to be managed by a new ‘‘subsidiary company’’ in which they and the European Club Association (ECA) will have equal representation.
Reflecting on the changes, Theodore Theodoridis, the acting Uefa general secretary, expressed his satisfaction that ‘‘European football remains united behind the concepts of solidarity, fair competition, fair distribution and good governance’’.
Seriously? What is fair about the elitism that has created a series of unbridgeable financial divides within European football. If it was about ‘‘fair competition’’ and ‘‘fair distribution’’, Uefa would have been hell bent on trying to reverse the tide of elitism, rather than allowing it to wash over them.
That battle, sadly, has been lost. Nobody cares about what is fair these days. All they worry about is viewing figures, commercial income - money, lovely, lovely money.
Under the existing rules, Spain, Germany and England are guaranteed three entrants at the group stage and Italy two. Each of the four nations has an additional place available through the playoffs. That means 11 guaranteed places with the possibility of four more.
As it happened, Roma and Villarreal failed to make it through the play-off round, beaten by Porto and Monaco respectively, so those four elite leagues will have ‘‘only’’ 13 of the 32 qualifiers while teams from Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Poland and Scotland join the usual suspects from Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey and Ukraine in making up the numbers.
Even that must feel wholly unsatisfactory to a club such as Ajax, beaten by Rostov in the play-off round, or even Hapoel, who could not quite make it past Celtic.
Qualification is about to get even harder, though. If you are not from one of the ‘‘Big Four’’ leagues, then a seat at European football’s top table is going to be very difficult to obtain.