Can We Not Play You Every Week?
It’s Champions League play-off time; and it’s already proved that familiarity does indeed breed contempt. The second instalment of the Benfica:Real Madrid trilogy turned out to be as unpleasant as the first game was incredible.
It’s a perfect example of not knowing when to stop. Once was enough. The game at the Estadio de Luz at the end of January was one of the games that European football nights should be all about; high drama, twists and turns and plenty of goals. Most of which has now been all but obliterated by the ugliness of this week’s game - which brought out the worst in almost everyone - and has not just overshadowed the earlier game but consigned it to utter irrelevance.
Hard to believe in 2026, but after the first seven seasons of the European Cup (Champions League in today’s money), Real Madrid and Benfica were the only two names on the trophy. Real dominated the competition with an array of global attacking might, winning it in the first five years and culminating in a 7-3 dismantling of Eintracht Frankfurt in Glasgow that still ranks as one of the best and most brutal performances of all time.
The end of this early dominance arrived in the shape of a Eusebio-inspired Benfica, who beat Barcelona in 1961, after the Catalans had ended Real’s hold on the trophy in the first round and retained it in 1962, in one of the greatest-ever finals. In that game in Amsterdam, the team from Lisbon overcame a two-goal deficit, and first-half hat-trick from Ferenc Puskas to win 5-3. They were denied a third consecutive success when Milan beat them at Wembley the following year, ushering in a three-year Italian stranglehold.
Fast forward and it’s hard to imagine Benfica winning it again, or even getting near a final. It’s difficult enough to make a case for Milan. Not that they don’t qualify on a regular basis, but because they just aren’t strong enough even when they do.
In the early days of the European Cup, of course, it really was a Champions Cup. And while it didn’t have the plethora of big names back then, as only one club per country qualified (as well as the holders), it had a certain allure that the modern incarnation has never managed to find. You had to really earn it.
Winning the domestic league was a pre-requisite. After that, those clubs navigated through two-legged knock-out rounds against the best of all of the other leagues, throwing up all kind of obstacles and challenges in terms of relatively unknown opponents, travel-times, varying weather and not least, the away goals rule.
Winners and Losers
Now I know change is inevitable. And I’m not suggesting that things shouldn’t evolve, but they should do so in the interests of becoming better. Not worse.
Not all will agree. If you support a team that rarely wins it’s own league but is good enough to get into the top four, five or maybe even six, then you’ll love the current ‘Champions’ League. If you prefer endless match-ups between Manchester City and Real Madrid, you’ll also be a fan. I get it.
And if you can’t give a shiny shite about pointless minnows from other countries that just clog up the early qualifying rounds and provide cannon fodder in the league stage, then this article probably isn’t for you either.
Take Ludogorets, the Bulgarian champions, for instance. They are arguably one of the biggest winners and losers of the way the Champions League operates today.
Pre-1992/93, when the name changed, a team winning the Bulgarian league (say a CSKA Sofia, as they often did at the time) would have a puncher’s chance of making an impression and, with luck and a fair wind, occasionally reach a quarter or semi-final.
What chance now for Ludogorets? Absolutely zero.
This is the Ludogorets that have become domestically invincible. They’ve won their own league every year since 2014, although this season they might relinquish the title. But this decade-plus of utter domestic dominance hasn’t translated to the bigger, continental stage.
They are too strong at home, but nowhere near strong enough away from it.
The Bulgarian league has become semi-competitive at best, and yet it still doesn’t make them any more potent in UEFA competitions. And this is just highlighting one league. Many, many more have teams who are on six, seven, eight, nine - and sometimes more - year winning streaks.
Closer to home, many people are rejoicing in Scotland because Hearts are making a fist of a title fight in a league where only two clubs have won it since Aberdeen in 1985. And where Celtic have won 13 of the last 14 titles, only punctuated in the fan-free 2020/21 season when Steven Gerrard led Rangers to a welcome victory. Yet few would bet against Celtic winning it again this time, and against any of the three finding the step up to the Champions League a step too far again.
Celtic were the first British club to win the European Cup. Rangers reached a semi-final (against Frankfurt) in the first Real era and were one win away from the final in the first year of the Champions League in 1993. The chances of ever doing so again? Probably the same as that of Ludogorets.
In this year’s second edition of the expanded Champions League, more than half of the 36 clubs in the league stage are from just four nations. Six are from England alone, and all qualified automatically. By contrast, Ludogorets had to get through three qualifying rounds to arrive at the same place. They fell short, beating Dynamo Minsk (in July), then Rijeka (also in July) before losing over two legs to Hungary’s Ferencvaros in the third round and falling into the Europa League. You’d think that Ferencvaros might have made it after that, but no, that got them to the play-offs where they lost to Qarabag and also fell into the Europa League too. They both had mixed campaigns, playing eight games to finish 22nd and 12th respectively to both reach yet another play-off round where – you guessed it – they play each other over two legs this month.
Drawbridge
Hungary and Bulgaria’s champions, therefore, are about to play their fifteenth and sixteenth games in Europe this year for the honour of reaching the last-16 of a second-tier competition, for smaller leagues and losers (no disrespect intended) who’ve already been knocked out at least once.
Meanwhile, six English teams, five Spanish and four each from Italy and Germany get richer in the Champions League; the six Premier League clubs currently placed in their own league in positions1, 2, 5, 6, 10 and 16!
Hardly the crème de la crème.
While accepting that money has talked, and this genie is never going back into the bottle, it’s worth reflecting that only Ajax (2019) have reached a semi-final from a country outside of the ‘big 4 or 5’ in recent memory.
In the late 1970s and through the1980s, the competition was won by clubs from England, Spain, Germany and Italy, but also from The Netherlands, Portugal, France, Yugoslavia and Romania. Representatives from Greece, Belgium and Sweden also reached finals.
Yet since 2010, only teams from England, Spain and Germany won it until PSG and France broke that triopoly last June. A European Super League by another name, indeed.
It’s unlikely we’ll ever see another FC Porto who won it in 2004, under Jose Mourinho, the current manager of Benfica and one of those hardly covering themselves in glory this week in Lisbon. To win, they qualified from a group with Real Madrid, Marseille and Partizan Belgrade, then beat Manchester United, Lyon, Deportivo La Coruna and Monaco. Not easy, but clearly not impossible.
Even by 2019 things were harder. Ajax negotiated Bayern and Benfica in their group, then had to beat Real and Juventus just to reach the last four.
But at least it was a bit different from endless Liverpool or Manchester City v Real matches.
Fittingly, it was a game involving Madrid that kick-started the Champions League to begin with when they and Maradona’s Napoli squared off in the first round in 1987/88. AC Milan owner Silvio Berlusconi called this "economic nonsense" at the time and it led, eventually, to a convoluted league phase where the earliest elimination for any half-decent team is February.
This is what the big teams (and UEFA to be fair) always wanted. And the drawbridge has now been pulled up while Ludogorets and the like are on the other side of the moat.
And it’s not coming down any time soon.
Super Cup
Before Covid, I wrote an article for a website focussed on the lower leagues, and far away from this mess. It was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek poke at a not-too-distant-future European Super League where PSG and Manchester City played each other every week – alternately home and away – in a league of their own.
If this sounds dull, fear not. There was a cup competition that was open to all. Unfortunately, the only way it could be remotely competitive was if Germany entered a combined team, there was a London XI and FC Real Barcelona made up the numbers.
But the innovation was that this cup was not – unlike the league – a closed shop.
There was a bonus spot available in the first road. Granted the qualification route was complicated but I’ll try to explain.
Let’s stick with Ludogorets. First they had to win the Bulgarian league, and then a play-off with fifteen other winners of ‘smaller leagues’ and the winner of that went into the next stage of sixteen more teams from slightly bigger leagues.
The winner of that entered a play-off round against the teams from the biggest leagues that had lost in their own qualifiers. If – and it’s quite a big if – Ludogorets won through this far, they could then select one of their players to be entered in the squad for the Rest of Europe team.
Who were then entered into the main draw.
To meet either PSG or Manchester City in the first round.
Over the best of three games.
Just in case.
Depressingly, it feels like we’re getting a little closer to this every year.
