Despite both candidates keeping a low profile, the forthcoming election for the new Uefa President is going to have a major influence on the future of European club football. For years, Lennart Johansson has managed to maintain a cautious approach in the European governing body’s relationship with the bigger clubs. While he had to bow to a number of demands from Europe’s elite clubs ? the creation of the Champions League being the most obvious example ? he never made a secret of his ambitions to challenge Joao Havelange (and later Joseph Blatter) for the role of FIFA President. Therefore, and despite increasing pressure from the G14, Johansson had to make sure part of the money generated by the European game was redistributed to the economically weaker countries. Considering the weight of the Asian and African federations, he wouldn’t have stood a chance to beat Havelange or Blatter without such gestures of solidarity.

Two Horse Race

FIFA is giving a lot of money away to third-world countries through a number of programmes and most confederations would have been extremely reluctant to vote for a man perceived as the running for the bigger clubs. For better or worse, Johansson has now announced that he will retire at the end of his current mandate which means that the race for his succession, and with it the end of a reign of uncertainty, is now open. Unless a major upset occurs, it will be a two-horse race between Frenchman Michel Platini and Bayern Munich’s Franz Beckenbauer. Both men have very different philosophies when it comes to the future of the European game and nothing illustrate this rift better than the recent debate about Uefa coefficients.

The row was started by Mircea Lucescu, the current Shakhtar Donetsk manager, after he found out that only two clubs from Eastern Europe had made it to the first round of the Champions League. Even worse, one of them, Sparta Prague was automatically qualified thanks to its good coefficient ? but we’ll get back to that later. The only club to go through the long and difficult process of preliminary rounds was Artmedia. The Slovaks beat Serbia’s Partizan Belgrad in the final round, which means that the first round will boast the minimum of two clubs from the former communist world.

The Inequities of UEFA Coefficients

Lucescu argument is pretty simple: only teams with a high Uefa coefficient are given a bye to the first round of the Champions League. At the same time, you have to play in the Champions League in order to have a high coefficient. Hence, teams from decent countries (Poland, Croatia, Serbia, Ukraine, Russia) have to beat a team from one of the best Western leagues to advance to the first round. So far, it has proved to be almost impossible for Eastern outfits to rival some of Europe’s finest. This season only, Shakhtar fell to Inter Milan, Hungary’s Debrecen bit the dust against Manchester United, Wisla Krakow couldn’t find a way past Panathinaikos, CSKA Sofia lost to holders Liverpool.

Let’s face it, the former Romania and Galatasaray manager’s righteous indignation is not simply motivated by his desire to see some equity restored at the higher level. What makes the current situation really challenging for everyone is that a lot of money has been invested in these clubs and those who are spending are expecting to see some sort of success. Regardless of the fact that most of the money invested in Eastern European football often comes from questionable activities, Zdzislaw Kapka (Wisla), Rinat L. Akhmetov (Shakhtar), Mirko Barisic (Dinamo Zagreb), Sergey Kuschenko (CSKA Moscow) are spending big at the moment and, to put it bluntly, if they begin to feel that they are refused access to the Champions League, they might start spending elsewhere.

Position In Danger

The stakes are pretty high because football is in danger of losing its position as number one sport in a geographical sphere of roughly 100 million people and that’s a risk neither Uefa nor FIFA are willing to take. If these countries revert back to amateurism, as it’s already been suggested in Romania and Hungary where clubs are facing a major financial crisis, football could hand over its leadership to other sports such as basketball, athletics, handball or ice hockey. A situation that would be unacceptable as nobody would want to take the responsibility for making half of Europe a no-man’s-land football-wise. However, without the money cascading from the pockets of dodgy businessmen a lot of clubs’ very existence is in danger.

Franz Beckenbauer

While Franz Beckenbauer is said to be to busy with the preparations for the forthcoming World Cup to make a statement, his position as the G14’s candidate makes his plans pretty clear. The most powerful European clubs would like to see the UEFA Cup, in which they are no longer interested, transformed into a competition for Eastern European clubs. The best from each country would battle it out in a format close to the current Champions League competition with one or two invitations for next season’s edition at stake.

According to Beckenbauer’s friends, this solution would ensure a healthy and interesting competition in the Eastern part of the continent while allowing some of the most successful clubs to rub shoulders with their Western cousins the following season. The concept in itself might sound attractive to some chairmen but it raises more questions than it answers: what kind of TV deals can Eastern clubs hope for when the richest networks are all based in Western Europe? Who is going to watch a second-rate version of the Champions League? What’s the point of playing more games when most clubs are having a hard time filling their stadiums?

Such a solution would also confirm the Champions League as a restricted club for richer European clubs. What of the universality of sport, then? Without the possibility to face superior opposition on a regular basis, it’s highly unlikely that clubs from the East would ever catch up on their Western counterparts. The best they could hope for is a lucrative cameo appearance at their rich neighbours’ feast. That’s hardly going to raise the level of the game in Eastern Europe or motivate anyone to invest in football but it would protect the Real Madrids of this world from those nasty surprises that keep happening every now and then.

Michel Platini’s Motives

Platini’s motives are just as suspect as Beckenbauer’s but his answer to the current crisis is slightly more commendable. The former France playmaker’s suggestion is give a bye to the first round to the champions of the first 25 countries, using national coefficients. The second, third and fourth-placed teams would then enter the preliminary rounds and play each other for the remaining seven spots. That system would guarantee a better representation at European level and with six games, would allow inexperienced teams the time to find their feet at the highest level.

Then again, Platini knows where his own interests are. Since his main competitor for the election already has been backed by Europe’s biggest clubs, he’s obviously looking for votes with such a proposition. The fact that it would allow champions from Georgia, Israel or Latvia to walk into the first round isn’t going to stop him. He also knows that his current attitude is going to win him a lot of friends outside Europe and since he’s already seen as Blatter’s understudy, his speeches on solidarity and universality are probably not as innocent as they sound.

What Platini conveniently forgot to tell is that allowing more Eastern European clubs in the current format of the Champions League would have a disastrous effect on local competitions. The aforementioned clubs are already way ahead of their rivals in terms of financial power so imagine if they could get their hands on a share of the Champions League’s astronomic TV rights. After a couple of successful European campaigns, Rosenborg have won 15 consecutive titles. In Czech Republic, Sparta Prague have managed to keep their stranglehold on the title because they can afford to outbid any other club when it comes to signing promising young players. In France, Lyon are bound to record their fifth league title in a row.

Domestic League Damage

If allowing more Eastern European clubs in the Champions League might look like a good short-term solution, the damage to the local leagues would be nothing short of a disaster. Most clubs are already unable to resist the financial power of Western and Russian clubs. As English fans are beginning to realise, a billionaire is often all it takes to turn an anonymous club into a title-winning machine. Making each of the original participants a giant in its own country is hardly going to make football more attractive to youngsters and neutrals in Eastern Europe. Worse still, it will probably give more weight to the G14’s calls for a European Super League as these nouveaux-riches clubs will be keen to make sure their place in the sun isn’t threatened by an ambitious neighbour.

Last but not least, what Lucescu conveniently forgets to tell is that two clubs, namely Steaua Bucharest and Lokomotiv Moscow, were paired with relatively modest opponents in the last round. Rosenborg are having a nightmare season in Norway and yet they overcame the Romanian champions. As for the state of Austrian football, it’s nothing short of a disaster as Graz’s pathetic exit against Strasbourg showed last week. That didn’t prevent Rapid Vienna from getting the better of Lokomotiv.

Giant Killings

So despite all the complaints, some clubs have also fallen victims of their own shortcomings. Assuming that Shakhtar or Partizan have a divine right to be in the Champions League is just as absurd as the system they denounce. You don’t have to look much further than FC Thoune to see that giant-killing feats are still possible. The Swiss outfit qualified for the group stage after beating Dynamo Kiev and Malm? despite their annual turnover of only 3 million euros (approx. 2 million pounds).

More than anything else, it’s the format of the Champions League that is flawed. The fact that so much money is shared between only a handful of clubs is bound to cause problems at a national level sooner or later. Regardless of the proportion of Eastern European clubs in the competition, there will always be complaints from those who have to watch the party from the sidelines. Unfortunately, unless UEFA decide to bring back the old Champions’ Cup, we are going to have to live with it for some time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 8th, 2005 at 11:07 pm and is filed under General Football Articles. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.