Greed Is Destroying European Football, but Too Many Don’t See It as a Problem

And so with a weary sigh, the Champions League group stage comes to an end. There have been brilliant goals, lots of them, and a couple of exhilarating games.

The clashes between Atletico Madrid and Bayern Munich, between Manchester City and Barcelona, between Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid, had certain self-contained dramas. Ludogorets Razgrad and FC Rostov, here and there, put up encouraging fights. But fundamentally, it all passed with a shrug and a yawn.

Those big clashes have essentially ended up being meaningless, as both teams went through. Ludogorets and Rostov’s reward has been qualification for the Europa League, a far cry from the days when Bulgarian and Russian sides commonly reached the quarter- or semi-finals of major competitions. And repeatedly, the minnows have been thrashed.

The Champions League group stage has become boring.

There will be naysayers. There will be the Pollyannas who insist there were always big wins in the European Cup, that the competition’s past is viewed through rose-tinted glasses. And it’s true up to a point. There was always a Floriana or a Dudelange to be thumped 10-0.

The old-style knockout European Cup had many, many flaws. But that’s not what the comparison should be. Nobody’s talking about a return to a champions-only five-round knockout competition. The comparison should be to 10 or 20 years ago, and even over that short space of time, the change in the Champions League is deeply worrying.

Put aside, for a moment, the subjective sense that the group stage of the Champions League has become boring. Until 2013-14, there had never been a season in which the 96 group games in the Champions League had produced 10 or more matches won by four or more goals (which it seems reasonable to allow to serve as a definition of a thrashing). In every season since, there has been at least 10. This season, there were a record 14. In the past four seasons, there have been more thrashings than in the previous eight.

And to prove that isn’t just a feature of modern football, there have been 27 per cent more thrashings in the Champions League this season than in the Premier League, even though there have been 46 per cent more games …

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