Europe’s best cling to final superiority

The remedy might have been noxious, but the diagnosis was ­correct. In the months of ­clandestine talks that led, four years ago, to the abortive launch of the European Super League, one motivation above all drove the project forward. It was not, as received wisdom has it, ­simple greed, a desire among the game’s elite to ringfence as much of football’s wealth as possible. It was fear.

For the six continental European teams publicly involved, the Super League was almost an option of last resort. It had been increasingly ­obvious for a decade that the wealth of the Premier League was growing at such an exponential rate that it would soon cast everything else into shadow. Europe’s elite had to move, or risk drifting into irrelevance.

“There is already a Super League,” as the then-Juventus ­president, Andrea Agnelli, put it. He was ­speaking a year after the idea had been abandoned by all but two of its members, its only legacy seemingly to have calcified the status quo. “Slowly, the Premier League will attract all the talent, which goes where it is better paid. There is one Premier League at the start of the season, and another one from March.”

Agnelli has, of course, had a rough few years. His involvement in the Super League cost him the extensive powerbase he had established in European football; in 2022, he was forced to step down, along with the rest of his board at Juventus, with the club embroiled in various financial scandals. Still, scant solace is still ­solace: Agnelli can look at the state of European football and reflect that he was, at least, right.

A week in which Arsenal were knocked out of the Champions League semifinals – meaning, for the second year in a row, there will be no English representation in European football’s showpiece game – might seem a strange time to make that case, but the direction of travel is still clear.

Since 2017, Premier League sides have accounted for 40 per cent of all the places in the Champions League final, more than double its closest contender, Spain. The performance of England’s teams across the three European competitions this season means that, for the first time, the top five in the Premier League will qualify for the Champions League next year, stacking the odds even further in their favour.

The best illustration, though, is the fact that they will be joined by a sixth. Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur have endured seasons so desperately poor that, as an audience, we may have become anaesthetised to just how bad they have been.

Tottenham, currently 16th, are on course to record their lowest league finish since relegation in 1977. When Ruben Amorim said in January that his team might be the “worst in the history of Manchester United”, he was exaggerating a little: United were objectively weaker when they were relegated by Denis Law in 1974. When he said, this week, that they might become “the worst Premier League side to lift a European trophy”, he was not exaggerating at all.

That is, oddly, something to be proud of: not for Manchester United, but for the Premier League itself. In the rarefied air of the latter stages of the Champions League, the ­competitive edge honed by England’s financial strength is dulled just a ­little: Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and a couple of ­others can still put teams together that can match, and often overcome, the Premier League’s best.

A level below, though, it is barely even a contest. United and Spurs have spent much of the season exploring new and exciting domestic nadirs, but against Athletic Club (4th in La Liga) and Lyon (7th in Ligue 1) and Eintracht Frankfurt (3rd in the Bundesliga) they still possess a ­firepower, a depth of ­talent, that ­cannot be matched. Should the English entrants in the Europa League decide they find the ­competition meaningful, if they are not distracted by domestic ­matters, they appear to be distinctly superpowered.

There is, in a way, no ­better ­expression of the Premier League’s “position of historically ­unprecedented supremacy” over the rest of Europe, as journalist Miguel Delaney put it in his book States of Play, than the fact that it has sent two of its worst teams to the Europa League final. One of them will, somehow, end the ­campaign with a place in the Champions League.

That, of course, serves to underline the problem that European football has been wrestling with for a decade, the issue that the Super League, in its short-sighted, self-interested way, was designed to address. It is worth noting, though, that it also creates an issue for England’s clubs.

With the Premier League title decided and the relegation battle at an end, the race to finish in the top five is all that is left to stoke the embers of the season. Manchester City, Newcastle, Chelsea, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa all remain in contention; two must miss out. Newcastle face Chelsea on Sunday; Chelsea visit Forest on the final day.

For the three that make it – as well as for whoever emerges from the destruction derby of the Europa League final – the prize is a lucrative one: the expansion of the Champions League means a ­potential infusion of £100 million or so for a single campaign.

For many of those involved in the chase that revenue is vital. It brings with it status, of course, the chance to retain old players and to tempt new ones. It means raising horizons, ­little by little, so that soaring ­ambitions might one day be met. There are, though, more immediate concerns.

Aston Villa have built a model which all but demands the club has access to Champions League revenue. Chelsea have already needed to find creative ways to meet the Premier League’s financial rules. Manchester United’s minority owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, has spent a year or so scrimping and ­saving and cutting jobs, occasionally offering dark warnings of how ­parlous the club’s finances are.

There are, now, seven or eight Premier League teams running Champions League budgets. Some might be able to cope with an occasional absence, but others – especially the aspirants among their number – are all in. They have staked everything on the idea not only that the Premier League is a de facto Super League, but that they will be able to benefit from it. Their primary motivation, over the next two weeks, is not greed. It is fear: the fear of missing out, the fear of what happens if everyone else makes it, and they are left behind.

Photograph by Dan Mullan/Getty Images