Olympiacos were, by popular consent, the worst team anybody had seen in the
last 16 of the Champions League. OK, who knew that the jokes about Barnsley
giving Chelsea more of a game than they received from the Greek side would
come true? Yet all that Avram
Grant's humiliation at Oakwell in the FA Cup on Saturday did was
highlight the dismal nature of opponents who are as good as insurmountable
in their homeland, yet were lame to the point of embarrassment at Stamford
Bridge.
What should worry those governing European football is that Olympiacos have
won ten of the past 11 league titles in Greece and are just one point behind
Panathinaikos and on course for another, with the distraction of Champions
League football out of the way. We think our Premier League is elitist
because only four teams have the potential to win it. In fact, we get off
lightly.
The economic landscape that Uefa's prestige tournament is redefining across
Europe is as uncompetitive as a Soviet election under Stalin. In many
European countries, where Champions League entry is limited to one, perhaps
two clubs, the wealth of the Champions League has created monopolies,
super-clubs that are so powerful that the league is little more than a
one-horse race.
And it is going to get worse. Soon, Michel Platini, the Uefa president, will
implement his Champions League reforms, which will give five additional
places to teams from the 40 lowest-ranked nations. On the surface, it
appears a noble, egalitarian idea, distributing the Champions League
treasure across the Continent and reducing the gaps in football's society;
in reality, it could turn out to be the most destructive force in the
history of the domestic game in some countries.
Greek football is streaky. Most commonly, a club get a good squad together and
put in a run of two, maybe three, straight title wins. Since the 1952-53
season, the title has been retained 28 times. To provide a comparison, in
the same period the English crown has been retained on just 11 occasions
(and five of those since the creation of the Premier League). So there is
nothing unusual in one Greek club side holding sway.
What has changed is the permanence of that superiority. AEK Athens won three
on the spin between 1992 and 1994; Olympiacos took four between 1980 and
1983; Panathinaikos won five out of six between 1960 and 1965, but this
present run is unparalleled. Between 1997 and 2003, Olympiacos won seven
straight titles, then three more between 2005 and 2007.
Their stranglehold on the competition coincides with the emergence of the
revamped Champions League as the biggest influence on European football.
Olympiacos were no doubt embarking on one of those small eras of dominance
that are common in Greece when an unnaturally large bounty fell into their
laps, giving them an advantage that has proved overwhelming. It would take a
very bad management or executive decision to lose this grip (like sacking
the coach midway through the season, which Olympiacos did yesterday), just
as it would take a spectacularly poor league performance for one of
Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea or Liverpool to fail to secure the top
four places in the Premier League.
Now, imagine instead of four teams splitting that Champions League windfall,
there were two, or worse, one. The competition would be over. Yet this is
what Platini's scheme could bring. His heart may be in the right place, but
he is wielding enormous power and not with great responsibility. The
pioneers of experiments in nuclear fission probably envisaged a force for
good, too.
One of the arguments against the introduction of a lucrative 39th game, the
ill-fated international round, in the Premier League is that the extra money
would do nothing to rebalance finances. The logic runs that if everybody
gets an additional £5 million, what does it matter? This is not entirely
true, because the benefits would be relative. An extra £5 million at
Manchester United would have minimal impact, but the same figure could buy
one or two good-quality players for Derby County. They would not win the
league as a result, but it might give them half a chance of winning more
than one match in 28.
Put it another way. If every club have £5 million and a few clubs have £10
million, that is not necessarily a problem; but if every club have nothing
and one club have £5 million, although the margins are the same, the outcome
is calamitous. That is what Platini risks by introducing bumper Champions
League bonuses to impoverished domestic leagues in parts of Europe.
Take Hungary. For the past three years the national championship has been won
by Debrecen, a small club from Hungary's second-biggest city. Debrecen have
a ground capacity of only 10,200 and have made scant impact on the Champions
League in three campaigns, never making it through the early qualifying
rounds. This season the club face a serious challenge to their supremacy
from MTK Budapest and Honved, two more established teams from the capital.
Now, imagine the consequences of Platini's plan if one of those clubs can get
into the Champions League and stay there for more than one season. That is
all it would take.
Hungarian football is in the doldrums and Platini is right to wish to address
that. But his scheme is the equivalent of a lottery win for one club in
which a giant hand emerges from the sleeve of a Uefa blazer in the sky,
points at a single team and announces: “It's you.” Platini wishes to project
the Champions League message of strength through lolly across Europe, but he
will not make the Hungarian league richer. He will create a Hungarian
super-club with resources that completely unbalance the domestic
competition.
This has already begun to happen in some unexpected places. In the
Netherlands, for instance, where PSV Eindhoven are well on the way to a
fourth straight title win that will equal their record set between 1986 and
1989, when Guus Hiddink was in charge. Except Hiddink's PSV were among the
best teams in Europe and won the European Cup in 1988 with a starting
line-up that included Ronald Koeman. The present PSV side could not get out
of their Champions League group, but the injection of money from lucrative
European campaigns is making them too strong for their rivals in the
Eredivisie.
Dutch football, like Greek, tended towards short spells of domination, yet
this would be PSV's seventh title in nine seasons. To compare, the great
Ajax side inspired by Johan Cruyff won the European Cup in three straight
seasons between 1971 and 1973 but never claimed more than back-to-back
domestic titles.
What Champions League money is doing to European football is similar to the
effect of the interests of the Western powers on democracy in Iraq. A
country rarely well served by its leaders, Iraq's people have always found a
way of removing an unjust government until the brutal Saddam Hussein took
power. Western arms made Hussein so powerful that the Iraqi people became
powerless and Platini's plan to bring isolated wealth to Europe's forgotten
leagues follows a similarly ruinous principle.
A politician at heart, like his mentor, Sepp Blatter, Platini does not address
the real issues of equality in European football, such as wealth
distribution and seeding, because that would prompt the leading clubs to
revolt and could challenge his position at the head of the game in Europe.
Compromising, Platini thinks that by giving the champions of the Former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia a bigger crack at a Champions League place,
he is spreading about his largesse. But unless he then turns his mind to
wealth distribution once it is within a country, rather than just plonking a
large sack stuffed with cash in the lap of one joyful beneficiary, he is
doing more harm than good. Imagine FK Rabotnicki suddenly presented with £20
million.
Platini believes that this money will filter down the domestic league through
the transfer market, and perhaps it will, but all the while it serves only
to make one club stronger. Money from Chelsea and Manchester United is also
spread through the Premier League, but if it is used only to take the best
player from rival clubs, what is the benefit? Fulham received substantial
funds from United for Louis Saha, but which team are near the top and which
down the bottom?
Seeding based on five seasons rather than most recent league position is
another way of keeping the small clubs small and Platini missed his chance
to address that, too. It is ridiculous that if a fresh name did win the
Premier League, the club would be judged on their recent record in Europe,
not on their status as champions, and seeded accordingly at the group stage.
Yet reforming that regulation would strike at the very heart of the cosy
Champions League elite and Platini does not dare. So think of the outcry if
a significant percentage of Champions League money went through the domestic
league, not just to a handful of clubs.
The performance of Olympiacos in their 3-0
defeat at Stamford Bridge should be a warning. It carried a message
about the dangers of preserving privilege and how it ends in mediocrity.
Platini is on the brink of creating a Continent of teams just like that.
Feeble tough guys. Big strong weaklings. Scratch the surface and they could
not give Barnsley a game.
