The Champions League is bad

Maybe not for the reason you’d think.

I’ll admit upfront — I’m an Arsenal writer and fan and that is undoubtedly coloring this opinion, but I’d bet there are fans of other similarly situated clubs across Europe that would agree. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoy watching the best football in the world. It’s higher quality play than the World Cup, but that’s a hot take for another day.

The Champions League is an insular, exclusive slush fund that is designed to keep the rich clubs rich and maintain the status quo in European football. It’s the same teams every season, and the same top clubs are the favorites every year. There might be some changes on the fringes, especially with the Premier League participants where there are more good enough teams than spots to go around, but if you look at the winners, it’s the same bunch. In the last 20 years, one, maybe two winners were “surprises” — Chelsea in 2011-12 and Porto in 2003-04.

The Champions League winner this season could make more than €80M. Simply reaching the group stages netted clubs €15M. Winning a group stage match was worth almost €3M; drawing one, nearly €1M. For comparison, the Europa League winners (the secondary continental league), will make about €40M. Reaching the group stage is worth less than €3M, with a match win earning €570K and a draw €190K. And if you’re not in either of those competitions, you get a big, fat nothing.

But it gets better (well, worse). Last season, UEFA introduced “coefficient ranking and shares” for both the Champions and Europa League to funnel more money to the big clubs. For each competition, every group-stage club is assigned a rank based on 10-year performance in continental competitions. UEFA then takes a chunk of the prize money and splits it into shares. The highest ranked club gets 32 “shares” and the lowest ranked club gets 1 “share” of that amount.

In the Champions League, the money carved out for share distribution is the same amount as the total prize pool to be distributed for advancing in the competition! It’s €585M! In the Europa League, it’s half the prize pool for advancing, €84M. On the one hand, it seems fine to be rewarding consistent performance, but when you’ve got a system designed to maintain the status quo, it ends up handing more money to the same big clubs and further insulating them.

Recently, both Arsenal and Leicester City, good teams with probably good enough players that have been relatively successful for the past five years, released financial reports that showed they were both losing money. For Arsenal, it was the first time the club had lost money in nearly 20 years. The thing both clubs have in common: they’re not in the Champions League. The top brass at both clubs said as much; they said their club needs the money from the CL to be successful both on the pitch and on the balance books.

Heck, until this year when they dropped to 11th, Arsenal were perennially in the Forbes Money List Top 10 for football clubs. Said club chairman Sir Chips Keswick, “another season outside the Champions League will continue to apply pressure to our financial results.” That just shows you the near-necessity of qualifying. If you don’t make the Champions League, even as a financial powerhouse club, you’re going to struggle. If that’s the effect it has on a club with a global brand, imagine what it’s like for financially lesser teams with significantly smaller footprints. That doesn’t seem right to me.

The stagnation in the Champions League where the rich stay rich is part of the reason why runs like the one put together last season by Ajax are so special. I’d love to see an Ajax-like run every year in the CL but that just doesn’t happen. Now Ajax have an illustrious history of their own as a club, but they’ve long since fallen out of the “kings of Europe” conversation. Last season, they were a team full of young talent that was fun to watch. They almost made the final, missing out on away goals because of a miraculous comeback from Tottenham. Then the summer rolled around, and the big clubs, loaded up with their own Champions League money, came calling. Ajax sold their two best players Frenkie De Jong and Matthijs de Ligt to Barcelona and Juventus respectively. This season, they crashed out of the Champions League in the group stage and will probably do the same next year after they lose more key players to big clubs.

Yes, selling to those bigger clubs is part of Ajax’s business model, but it would be nice if the structure in place gave us at least a couple years of young upstart teams before the roster pillaging. Clubs should be able to protect their talent and build a core, not be forced into selling out of (at least in part) financial necessity. It would have been really fun to see what that bunch of guys could have grown into together.

To be fair to the Champions League, it is not the sole reason for the problems of wealth distribution and spending capacity in football. But it definitely plays a large part in maintaining and reinforcing the divide between the haves and the have-nots. And now the powers that be in European football want to create the Super League, which would further entrench the stratification in the club system. I don’t know what the answer is or what continental football should look like (although I think I just came up with a concept for a new post), but I do know that we should be looking for ways to broaden the pyramid not narrow it. I’m tired of seeing the same names at the top.