A European closed shop means the drama’s dead
BETWEEN 1955-56 and 2002-03, there was one meeting of English clubs in the European Cup and Champions League. Nottingham Forest and Liverpool in 1978-79.
Later the format changed, allowing multiple entries from the same competition. Tonight, when Tottenham play Manchester City it will be the 12th all Premier League tie in 16 seasons.
And as Tottenham are in a new stadium, Manchester City are on for an unprecedented Quadruple and the teams haven’t met in Europe before, it is still exciting. But give it a few years and the dead hand of Andrea Agnelli and see how you feel.
By the time the inheritor of Juventus is finished, the Champions League will be as moribund as — well, Serie A, or the Bundesliga, or any of the domestic competitions controlled by the men who now presume to reshape European football, having ruined their own.
Juventus are winning their league by 20 points and are on course for an eighth straight title. Meanwhile, the most mediocre Bayern Munich side in recent memory have just beaten their main rivals, Borussia dortmund, 5-0 to reclaim their place at the top of the league in Germany. Stay there, and it will be their seventh straight win.
And having greedily crushed all opposition, these clubs wonder why their markets are shrinking.
So Agnelli has an idea. And this shows how dim he is. He wants to turn the greatest club competition in the world into the International Champions Cup. He wants to limit surprise, limit the new, limit all of the uncertainty that makes sport compelling.
Who won the International Champions Cup last summer? Who cares? It’s an invitational, a gathering of the world’s wealthiest, hawking their wares around the globe under the pretence of competition. In 2016, Manchester United and Manchester City did not even complete their fixture schedules and nothing happened. Why would it?
It doesn’t matter whether this tournament finishes or not. Everyone comes back next year just the same because entry is for the richest, not the best. AC Milan have featured in every edition since the first in 2013, a period in which the club has finished eighth, 10th, and seventh, sixth and sixth.
this is what Agnelli wants for the Champions League. Not excellence, not brilliance: the right to be rubbish. He wants to take qualification away from league position and root it in history.
He wants endless repeats of the same uninspiring fixtures, because he imagines a global audience that knows no better and will lap it up. Most of all, he wants to strip the Premier League of everything that makes it good. He thinks our owners are as stupid as he is; long-term, who knows, he may be right.
Not all invitationals are without worth. The Masters is an invitational — to win it earns a lifelong invite — but one that equally acknowledges current form. The top 50 in the world are always present, as are those qualifying for the season-end Tour Championship. High finishers in the other major tournaments and leading amateurs are also acknowledged.
Agnelli’s plans would prioritise history. The past would trump the present, the old would flourish over the new.
Not all of his ideas are ruinous. His proposed format would simply make European competitions duller, not irrelevant. Four groups of eight instead of eight groups of four will involve many more fixtures fans can afford to miss, more dead rubbers and dead ends, but ultimately a recognisable competition should still emerge.
His scheme to link qualification to historic, not current, success however is the end of the Champions League as a prestige competition. Once Leicester can pull off the greatest achievement in
the history of English football and it cease to matter in Europe, the Champions League is dead.
Once an elite club can finish sixth without consequence, the domestic league is done, too. The league must be relevant. Success there must afford entry to Europe. Abandon that principle and the entire campaign is worthless. Why watch, if we know the outcome?
THIS season’s Premier League title race is compelling, but so is the fight for two Champions League places between four clubs. Tottenham, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United are separated by a handful of points.
Yet what if we already knew Manchester United and Chelsea were through, due to their status as past winners? Then the drama is dead. As is fifth-placed Atalanta’s battle with the Milan clubs in Italy; and Getafe’s fairy tale in Spain; and the resurgence of Eintracht Frankfurt in Germany — a club without a top-four finish in 26 years. At Wembley on Sunday,
the supporters of Wolverhampton Wanderers and Watford made for the most inspiring noise the new stadium has heard.
Are we to tell those fans that, soon, there will be a red rope across the door, and only those who were good decades ago will be allowed through.
That is Agnelli’s intention: the endless recycling of matches between the self- styled elite, mediocre Milan versus average Arsenal, with other, deserving match-ups ignored. The allEnglish games still carry excitement, but Liverpool have met Chelsea five times in the Champions League since 2005.
If they had played again this year it would not have carried the same excitement — just as Liverpool against Porto is rather underwhelming given their mismatch a year ago. Imagine then, if it didn’t even matter who won — if the same round of fixtures were destined to be rerun, regardless of quality, regardless of competitive balance, regardless of merit.
That is Agnelli’s proposal. Maybe it comes from inherited wealth. A person feels entitled. To everything.