Why the European Super League threat still lingers

A year on from the Super League debacle and European football is once more at a fork in the road.

Juventus boss Andrea Agnelli saw a chance to grab a bigger slice of the pie

A year on from the Super League debacle and European football is once more at a fork in the road. One path would further entrench the power and wealth of the continent’s elite clubs, the other would give UEFA the chance to draw a line in the sand.

The collapse of the European Super League handed UEFA an opportunity to end the seemingly relentless march of the big clubs and achieve a more equitable competitive balance, as well as redistributing the wealth it generates from the Champions League more widely. Yet there are signs that the European clubs are once more trying to assert their grip on the competition.

The first issue is qualification for the new-look Champions League from the 2024-25 season when the new “Swiss model” format with 36 instead of 32 teams begins. One of the extra spots will go to provide an extra place for France or Portugal, another will be an automatic place to the 11th ranked country — likely to be Serbia.

The initial plan was for the other two spots to be allocated to clubs with the highest UEFA coefficient — a ranking based on previous performances in Europe over five years — who had failed to qualify via their domestic league. For example that would mean if Manchester United finished fifth in the Premier League and Roma fifth in Serie A, they would still qualify because of their UEFA coefficient.

After the ESL collapse, with the biggest clubs having left the European Club Association, UEFA had the chance to ditch that plan — indeed its leaders have consistently indicated that will happen, with its president Aleksander Ceferin stating in March that those two places would go to “smaller and mainly, to be honest, mid-size leagues”.

The ECA has since welcomed back some of the ESL rebels and has dug its heels in over the plan, insisting that those two places should still go to the club with the highest ranking. Some of those in the organisation believe it is already a done deal after the “leapfrogging” element of it was scrapped — the team with the highest coefficient would have to finish fifth or win their domestic cup, they could not finish sixth or seventh and leapfrog other teams into the Champions League.

But UEFA’S leaders insist that the decision is still under review, while the European Leagues organisation is putting on all the pressure it can muster to make qualification based on domestic league performance.

May 10 will be decision day: that is when UEFA’s executive committee meets the day before its annual congress in Vienna.

Sources with knowledge of the process insist nothing is finalised and it is still more than possible that UEFA will decide to have no coefficient places or just a single place. That would indeed be one in the eye for the elite clubs.

The one card UEFA can still play is the number of matches in the group stage. The blueprint is for each club to play 10 games rather than six now, but the Swiss model allows any number to be played — each club plays a specified number of games against other teams based on seeding, with the results going into a single league table.

The small and medium-sized clubs may like the idea of 10 guaranteed games in terms of match-day income, but others involved in the debate believe that is too many to sustain interest and eight group matches would be better.

Once the final decision is made on qualification, there is likely to be a long and testy debate over exactly how the Champions League revenue is distributed that will perhaps run all the way until 2024.

It is arguably an even more significant decision given that UEFA is expecting a staggering increase in income from TV and commercial rights to its new-look competition, up 40 per cent to more than $7bn per year.

Champions League revenue distribution is already weighted heavily towards the established clubs as part of an agreement made in August 2016. The timing of that was significant — it was a time when UEFA was rudderless with Michel Platini having been suspended as president and a month before the election of Ceferin.

Driven by Bayern Munich’s Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Juventus’s Andrea Agnelli, the big continental clubs saw their chance to push through changes with the twin aims of getting a share of English TV money and further enriching themselves.

The new financial distribution that came in to force from 2018 allocated 30 per cent of total Champions League TV money to the 32 teams in the Champions League based on their performances in Europe over the past 10 years. What that means in practice is that if, for example, West Ham United make it into the Champions League by winning the Europa League, their share of the coefficient pot will be just $1.9m, while Chelsea’s, the top-ranked English club, will be $47m.

In fact given that the remaining Super League rebels Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus are among the top six in terms of the 10-year coefficient and have cut the gap on the English clubs financially, it seems incredible that this was still not enough, and that they pushed ahead with the breakaway plan.

So how will UEFA handle the distribution of this deluge of new riches from the new Champions League?

On one side, there is the European Leagues, who would like more money given to the clubs in the Europa League and Europa Conference League, and more in solidarity payments to the rest of European football. The organisation would also like an end to the coefficient funding system, but accept that the horse has already bolted from that stable.

On the other is the ECA, not as controlled by the elite clubs as it was before the Super League attempt, but nevertheless still in their thrall to some extent.

UEFA has to make the judgment about how far it can use the ESL’s collapse to return some lost balance to its club competitions.

It is a decision that will shape European football until well into the next decade.

CHAMPIONS LEAGUE REFORMS EXPLAINED

WHAT ARE THE MAIN CHANGES?

The group stage will be increased to 36 clubs from 32 and there will be one league instead of several pools. Each side could play as many as 10 group matches (five home, five away), with every team’s fixture list of roughly equal difficulty. The top eight then qualify automatically for the last 16, while the teams ranked between ninth and 24th play a two-legged tie to determine the other eight spots. The knockout phase continues from here.

WHEN WILL THE CHANGES COME INTO EFFECT?

The 2024-2025 season will be the launch of the new competition, when the present broadcasting deal expires.

The Times