Wolves show ambition and the elite cartel get twitchy
First, Maurizio sarri couldn’t win a trophy and now he can’t stop. the complication is, these are not the type of trophies the newly entitled super clubs want to win.
the Europa League, serie A, pah. sarri landed both of those and was ousted anyway. By the end he wanted gone from Chelsea as much as they wanted rid of him but, either way, winning the lesser of UEFA’s club competitions wasn’t going to save him.
As for Juventus, they hold their own domestic league in contempt these days, talking of fielding reserve teams if the Champions League could be successfully expanded. How sad is that?
so this is where we are. serie A used to be the competition that the greatest players in the world aspired to. the league of ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Frank rijkaard; the league of
catenaccio and the most uncompromising defenders; 10 goals in italy were worth 20 in England.
We judged our own on whether they could make it there, thinking more of players such as John Charles and Liam Brady because they did. Now, Juventus win it and sack the manager, like it’s the Carabao Cup.
same with Chelsea and the Europa League. two managers have delivered it for them, sarri and rafael Benitez, and neither was retained the following season. For a club that won a single European trophy in the first 42 years of UEFA competition, that’s some attitude.
then again, the manager that secured their sole Champions League triumph, roberto di Matteo, did not last the group stage of the next campaign. that’s how big Chelsea think they are.
And yet they’re scared of Wolves, these goliaths. if Wolves can make it into the Champions League next season — and they will have to win the Europa League first, starting with quarter-final victory over old hands sevilla tonight — they will only be allowed 23 squad players, not 25.
Wolves are the latest to fall foul of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules, a set of regulations as good as ghost-written by the elite, so only those clubs with historically established revenue streams could compete and comply.
the likes of Chelsea and Juve don’t care about the Europa League; they just don’t want anyone else to win it. Well, not anyone like Wolves, anyway. A club on the up, with ambition, trying to muscle their way in. it is going to be very hard for Wolves to qualify for Europe next season. Arsenal winning the FA Cup blocked their league route and while the Europa League is beneath some, it invariably contains dangerous wildcards.
sevilla have won it five times, while inter Milan finished a point behind Juventus in serie A and Manchester United are much improved under Ole Gunnar solskjaer. if results go a certain way, Wolves could end up needing to beat all three.
Yet that is still too much of a threat for some. should they
qualify, Wolves will play with a reduced squad across the next two seasons, and will pay a fine between £180,000 and £540,000, depending on compliance.
Wolves’ ambition is the problem it seems, not the complacency that sees Juventus win Serie A for an unprecedented ninth straight year and regard that as failure.
Watching as Bayern Munich eased past Chelsea on Saturday night was Oliver Kahn. He joined the club’s executive board in January and will succeed Karl-Heinz Rummenigge as chief executive in January 2022. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
‘I think we should treat this FFP more seriously in future,’ he said last week.
Again, note the ‘we’. It was the way Rummenigge spoke about FFP recently, too. As if he owned it. Which in a way he does, because it was certainly designed to make clubs such as Bayern Munich happy, by conforming perfectly to their business model and few others.
The result? An unprecedented eight straight Bundesliga titles. Niko Kovac, who won the seventh, did not make it through November the following season; Carlo Ancelotti, who won the fifth, did not last through September.
Yet despite this utter dominance, Munich remain so frightened of a challenge that their executives keep applying pressure over FFP for fear the stranglehold might slip, and upstarts such as Wolves could get in.
THe Elite will peddle the lie that clubs should grow organically while making that impossible. Without ambition, how could Wolves keep this exciting squad of players?
Answer: they couldn’t. They would be picked off, one at a time, by the very clubs that have shaped the rules to make it ever more likely this will happen.
It is a racket, a cartel, forged by clubs and men whose sense of entitlement is so great they no longer value leagues with a grand history dating back to 1898, or one of only two major european competitions.
Not so long ago, Andrea Agnelli, chairman of Juventus, argued that Champions league qualification should be decided on historical success, so that a newly flourishing club such as Atalanta would be demoted to the europa league, even if they finished in the top four, replaced by the likes of Roma or AC Milan.
He didn’t get his way. But UeFA have done the next best thing, changing the financial rewards to make the rich even richer, through coefficient rankings.
This year, for instance, Juventus have taken more out of the Champions league despite getting knocked out in the round of 16 than rivals who have progressed further.
Through co- efficients and a superior TV pool, Juventus have made roughly £78million. Napoli, also out in the last round, have collected nearly £63m. Atalanta, still in it and playing Paris Saint- Germain tomorrow night, have by comparison earned approximately £51m so far.
Meaning Juventus are £27m better off than Atalanta, despite being inferior to them in europe this season. They are better off just for being Juventus.
This, apparently, is fair play. No wonder these clubs feel the need to constantly pressure it into existence. In a true meritocracy, their ideals would be laughed out of the room.