How lust for money gave birth to the Champions League
As the competition returns, Julian Bennetts talks to its founders about their memories and misgivings
It makes sense that the founding father of the modern Champions League – brash, entertaining – was Silvio Berlusconi, one of the ultimate showmen. Thirty years ago, Berlusconi’s goal was not improving football, it was finding new income streams for two key investments – AC Milan and satellite television station Canale 5. The key to making both companies profitable lay in overhauling the European Cup.
He approached Saatchi & Saatchi, which gave the job to one of its English executives, Alex Fynn. Months previously, at the launch of the Rothmans Football Yearbook, Fynn had given a speech entitled “A 10-point plan for football” that advocated a European Super League. Now he was asked to make that plan a reality. “I got a call from the head of our Italian agency,” recalls Fynn. “He said to me, ‘Alex, I’ve got the job you’ve always wanted: design a Super League for Silvio Berlusconi’.”
Fynn realised Berlusconi’s desire for change was based on maximising viewing figures and television rights. Berlusconi had been horrified when the champions of Italy and Spain, Napoli and Real Madrid, met in the first round of the 1987-88 competition.
Having the European Cup as a straight knockout competition was exciting, but it made no commercial sense. “On any given day, David could beat Goliath – and Berlusconi felt this should be stopped,” says Fynn. “He came to me and I did his bidding. But I gave him what I thought he wanted, not what I thought he needed.”
Fynn envisaged a super league of 30 to 40 clubs in four divisions. But Berlusconi wanted more games for the big teams from Europe’s biggest leagues – England, Italy, Spain and Germany. The best way to guarantee this was a league format, to guarantee a steady income.
So, during 1988, Fynn drew up plans for an 18-team super league, consisting of two or three clubs from each of the four biggest leagues, plus representatives from Scotland, France, Portugal, Holland and Belgium. “The key,” says Fynn, was “more event games between the big clubs in the big television markets.”
Glasgow Rangers, who at the time were arguably the most influential club in Britain, also believed that change was needed. “Domestically, there was a ceiling,” says Campbell Ogilvie, who was club secretary at the time and went on to become president of the Scottish Football Association.
“And in Europe, you could be out after one round. I remember we played Osasuna in 1985-86 and went out. That spurred on discussion for all clubs of our size – how do we take this forward? Can we get European football into some sort of structure where we could at least be guaranteed six games, three of them at home? That was where it started from.”
Ogilvie drew up his own plans for a competition that involved a group system, followed by knockout rounds. “I spoke to various people,” he says. “We were all asking how to take things forward. We decided we would have a go. But at that time change was difficult to bring about.”
At this point, Fynn was lobbying Uefa for change on behalf of Berlusconi, while Ogilvie was doing the same from inside the organisation as representative of a major club. Uefa twice rejected Ogilvie’s plan, but general secretary Gerhard Aigner and president Lennart Johansson realised that change was inevitable and without action they ran the risk of clubs breaking away to form their own league. “Uefa realised they might lose control of their own clubs and that there was an awful lot of value in television,” says Fynn.
Ogilvie proposed his plan for a third time in 1989. Preferring his format to Berlusconi’s proposed Super League, Uefa adopted it for use from the 1992-93 season.
Berlusconi was pleased. Fynn believes it was the outcome he ultimately wanted, and the threat of a breakaway super league had merely been a negotiating tactic to achieve it.
“I was naive,” he says. “I thought he would push it [the idea of a Super League] forward, but instead he used it as a threat to get the old-style European Cup changed. I believe he used the super league idea as a stalking horse.”
Both Fynn and Ogilvie admit to having mixed feelings about their roles in the formation of the Champions League, with both lamenting that only a select few clubs are contenders to win it.
“Mine was a football model,” says Ogilvie. “I was of the view it was a champions’ competition. I never thought four teams from the same country would be playing in it.
“Things evolve and it became obvious that to get the higher TV revenues, it was going to need more teams from the big countries that command the TV rights. But we have created super-clubs. It needs to be addressed. The one thing you have to have in football is competition.”
Fynn says: “What we have now is a hybrid system – neither league nor cup. It’s fine if you are a member of this select group of clubs, but otherwise it’s not healthy.”
Neither is sure what steps can be taken but both agree with a growing sense that, as in the late 1980s, it is time for change.