MARTIN SAMUEL COLUMN: Juventus chief Andrea Agnelli is a creeping, crawling, self-serving, protectionist snake. He is a man without a single cell of feeling for sport or sporting integrity. His plan will kill off football
- Andrea Agnelli's proposed plan will destroy the Champions League and football
- His stupidity would kill a sport that belongs to the working men and women
- Agnelli and his allies are frightened little men with plans to make football dull
A series on
Netflix this month will make clear the role of Scottish footballers in the formation of what is termed The English Game.
Written by Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey,
it will chart the rise of football in England, including the enormous contribution of what were known as the Scottish Professors. It was the influence of players imported from north of the border that made football the sport we recognise today.
England’s fledgling game was about dribbling, but Scotland’s players passed. There were seven of them in Preston’s Invincibles, while
Liverpool fielded an entire team of Scots in 1892 and Lord Kinnaird played in nine
FA Cup finals between 1873 and 1883, winning five of them. The debt English football owes to the first professionals from Scotland is incalculable.Doesn’t count for much these days, though, does it? Now Scotland are in the doldrums, this brilliant reimagining of the sport doesn’t amount to a place at the World Cup finals. Unquestionably, Scotland have been left behind. Others have taken the philosophy of the Scottish Professors on. And that’s it. Tough. That’s the point of sport. It’s a meritocracy.
Just last June will seem a lifetime away if Tottenham and Liverpool exit the Champions League this week. Their status as the 2019 finalists will be rightly irrelevant. Nothing burns through history quicker than the evolution of sporting competition. The game in Madrid on June 1 last year has about as much bearing on events in Leipzig and Liverpool this week as the matches that took place in the final decades of the 19th century.
What makes sport so endlessly compelling — the best reality television, because there truly is not even the germ of a script — can be found in the shiver of anticipation on the first day of the season. The grass freshly shorn, the lines brightly painted, the summer sun shining and anything possible. On August 8, 2015, Leicester walked out at the King Power Stadium to face Sunderland. Their fans had no clue they were about to watch the first game of that season’s champions. Had anyone suggested so, they would have thought them insane. Yet, technically, it was possible. Anything is possible. That is all you have to believe. And if it is not possible, sport is dead.
That Andrea Agnelli is the president of the European Clubs’ Association says all that needs to be known about the creeping, crawling, self-serving, protectionist snakes at the elite end of that organisation. He is a man without a single cell of feeling for sport or sporting integrity.
He has lucked out by birth into control of one of football’s great dynasties — Juventus. And from this position of enormous good fortune, he wants to destroy the greatest club competition in the world and football as it is known and loved. Not spoil, or harm, or even ruin. Destroy. If the type of structure Agnelli proposes came to pass, the Champions League as a competition of interest would be no more. Domestic football would be as good as finished.
His greed, his stupidity, would kill a sport that belongs not to entitled children of trust funds and inheritance, but to the working men and women across Europe and beyond.
Our game, our fun — not his desperate revenue stream. Our sliver of pleasure, not his security blanket, because he has messed up the financial model of his own business in Serie A.
Agnelli is a mediocre mind in a world increasingly full of them, so it stands to reason it is mediocrity he wishes to reward and enshrine.
Agnelli spoke at the Financial Times Business of Football Summit in London last week, when he came up with his plan to preserve bad football.
‘I have great respect for everything Atalanta are doing, but without international history and thanks to just one great season, they had direct access to the primary European club competition,’ said Agnelli. ‘Is that right or not? Then I think of Roma, who contributed in recent years to maintaining Italy’s ranking. They had one bad season and are out, with all the consequent damage to them financially. The point is how we balance the contribution to European football and the performance of a single year.’
In other words, the closed shop. That is what he wants for the Champions League. To seal it from meritocracy, the same handful of wealthy elite clubs playing the same repetitive fixtures year after year, regardless of their quality. Roma have been such a fixture in Europe’s premier club competition that they qualified for it once between 1955 and 2001. Yet their place should be preserved in perpetuity, at the expense of better, smaller clubs, because of a moment in time?
Why can’t Atalanta grow to be a more admirable force in Italian football than Roma have been for decades? They just need the chance and this freedom terrifies their supposed betters. It is a myth that the elite deserve anything they cannot earn for themselves, every year, starting anew. Roma’s contribution to European football is a myth, too. It is zilch. Their European honours list amounts to a competition UEFA don’t even count any more, the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup in 1960-61. Newcastle have won a European trophy more recently.
So what Agnelli thinks is important are Roma’s years of being ordinary, of nicking in as one of Serie A’s highly-placed also-rans — they last won the title 20 seasons ago — and reaching the odd knockout round. Roma are useless in Europe. Most years they are eliminated by the first good team they play, including once in the qualifiers, when they were drawn against Porto and beaten 4-1 on aggregate. In the last 12 seasons, Roma have qualified only six times and made it beyond the round of 16 once. Arsenal removed them in 2008-09, Shakhtar Donetsk in 2010-11, Bayern Munich put seven past them in a group stage game in 2014-15, Real Madrid beat them 4-0 on aggregate in 2015-16 and Porto did for them at the first knockout stage last year.
So Roma’s sole meaningful season in the Champions League, since reaching the final in 1984, is that semi-final place against Liverpool in 2018, when they conceded five in the first leg. And this is why Atalanta do not deserve to be in the Champions League? For this great legacy of making up the numbers? Last season, Atalanta finished three points and two places above Roma, won two more matches, scored 11 more goals and conceded two fewer. They lead them by three points again this season, with a game in hand, and have beaten Roma home and away. Indeed, Roma have won a single game against Atalanta in 12 meetings dating back six seasons.
Why the hell should Roma get Atalanta’s European place? Atalanta travel to Valencia this week, leading 4-1 from the first leg. They do not need the patronising respect of Agnelli and his cabal of inferior intellects. They are earning it with each passing year the only way that matters — on results.
Last season, they played Juventus three times — won one, drew two. That is what Agnelli wishes to stop — competition. This is not about protecting Roma’s right to be useless, it is Juventus that Agnelli truly fears are not good enough.
Sure, they win Serie A every year, which is why the league does badly in foreign markets, because who wants to watch that — but beyond?
If Agnelli wants to talk contribution to European football, Juventus have no greater pedigree as rulers of it than Nottingham Forest. Two European crowns, the same as Brian Clough. That’s it for Italy’s greatest, richest club. Juventus haven’t won the Champions League this century or in its modern, 32-club format. There were 24 teams in the competition and only 16 in the group stage when Juventus last won in 1996. It was still the European Cup the time before that, in 1984-85.
Juventus had to overcome the mighty Ilves Tampere of Finland, Grasshoppers Zurich, Sparta Prague and Bordeaux before beating Liverpool in the final. That aside, their claim to fame is the most losing finals in Champions League and European Cup history — seven, including their last five on the spin. And while it is a far stronger contribution than the rank ordinariness of Roma in Europe, for a club of Juve’s stature it is greatly underwhelming.
The biggest club in Spain, Real Madrid, has 13 titles, Bayern Munich have five, Manchester United three — although Liverpool have six — Ajax four. Juventus are eclipsed by their equivalents in every European country and by AC Milan in their own, with seven. No wonder Agnelli wishes to lower the bar of achievement for an entitled few. It terrifies him to see Atalanta in his own country, or Leicester, Wolves and Sheffield United in this one, on the brink of breaking into his cosy little cartel.
He’s bought Cristiano Ronaldo and still can’t get the lucrative broadcast markets interested in Juventus the way they are in Premier League stragglers. And while Atalanta stuck four past Valencia last month, his own team lost to Lyon, currently the seventh placed team in France.
This is what Agnelli and the ECA want — the right to be lousy. The right to just turn up and claim the money. They don’t want to have to be good, to qualify, to rise above the very clubs at which they sneer so haughtily. Everton’s Carlo Ancelotti spoke this week of trying to take them into the Champions League — which he has won, as a player and manager, five times to Juventus’ two. But even if he performed that feat, Agnelli wants to deny entry.
Who would then invest in Everton, or any club outside a handful, when the glass ceiling has been so shamelessly, brazenly installed?
This is what Agnelli and his allies demand. They want the right to finish above Atalanta and Leicester even when they don’t, the right to be rewarded even when so plainly inferior. They want the right to kill dreams, to strangle competition.
They are frightened little men with plans that would only make football dull and mediocre.
All the wealth ring-fenced for the few, the first day of the season a shrug because nothing can happen and certainly won’t. It is the opposite of what sport should be. We resist this now, or future generations will watch programmes about what football used to be like in the early 21st century —
before Andrea Agnelli and his contemptible type killed our game stone dead.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/f...Agnelli-self-serving-protectionist-snake.html
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