Same old story: Outsiders don't stand a chance in Champions League
Maybe they should just rename it The Big Three Plus Three.
Three big leagues and three big clubs, and that's it. The Champions League group stage has revealed, once again, that the gap between the rich and not-so-rich in Europe is growing and it isn't going to get better.
Europe's biggest crown is a closed shop. Unless you're from one of the Big Three leagues or you happen to be the club dominating the scene in Germany, France or Holland, you might want to plan on renting a couple of DVDs between February and May, because, odds are, you won't be playing in the Champions League knockout stages.
Between them, La Liga, Serie A and the Premiership sent 10 teams into the group stage of the Champions League. All 10 qualified for the next round, with six topping their groups. True, Chievo and Osasuna -- Spain and Italy's fourth representatives -- were knocked out in the qualifying stage. But Chievo was only there because of the shenanigans of Fiorentina and Juventus.
Chievo Verona's "flying donkeys" were never equipped for the Champions League and, in any case, have bigger fish to fry (like figuring out how to avoid relegation). And the latter also applies to Osasuna, an overachiever that was out of its depth at this altitude.
Bayern Munich, Lyon and PSV Eindhoven all qualified as well, which was, frankly, not surprising. The simple truth is that these teams dominate comparatively second-tier leagues. Lyon has won five straight French titles. Bayern and PSV have won three of the last four and six of the last eight.
These clubs exist in a sort of privileged limbo. Every year, they lose top players to the Big Three (Michael Ballack, Mahamadou Diarra, Andre Ooijer) and every season they fill their shoes by cherry-picking the cream of the crop from their domestic league.
If the Big Three are the aristocracy, these three are the bourgeoisie, who know they have to be subservient to the blue-bloods but make up for it by oppressing the masses.
The masses is everybody else. This year, three clubs from outside the Big Three Plus Three advanced to the knockout stage.
Celtic did it while losing to everybody else in the group at least once. Lille did it by winning just two games, one of them away to AC Milan in its last group-stage match, with the Rossoneri
showing about as much interest in the game as Liberace might have shown in Ginger Lynn.
Porto, which, to be fair, is a reasonable team, advanced thanks to a draw with Arsenal which was always in the cards (both teams needed a point to go through).
The reality though is that the balance of power is wholly skewed in favor of a very select number of clubs.
Porto and Monaco are the only clubs from outside the Big Three Plus Three to have reached the semifinals in the last four years. And in the last 32 quarterfinalists just four clubs have come from outside the hallowed circle of privilege.
There are a bunch of reasons for this: Most have to do with TV money and the capacity of a club to exploit its dominant position domestically. And there is no easy way to address it. But it does need to be dealt with because the risks are real, and not just from a sporting perspective, but from a commercial one, too.
UEFA makes money (which it then redistributes to clubs) by selling Champions League rights in each individual European nation. How soon before a broadcaster in Belgium, Sweden or Russia decides that it no longer wants to pay top dollar for a competition where none of its domestic clubs have a prayer? And even in the case of France and Germany (two of Europe's three wealthiest TV markets), why pay so much for the whole competition when, at best, you'll get to see Lyon or Bayern?
The dominance of the Big Three has never been more obvious. Milan, stuttering in the bottom half of Serie A, wins its group with two weeks to spare. Liverpool, 11 points off the pace domestically, also qualifies early, as does Valencia, ninth in La Liga. If this were a level playing field, there would be no real problem. But it isn't. Something needs to be done.
By Gabriele Marcotti
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