Survival Of The Fattest

The greed of the top teams is killing the Champions League. It’s times like this when the world looks for a super league.

- Jonathan Wilson

EVERY YEAR the Champions League comes around with a greater sense of futility. Perhaps there’ll be a shock. Perhaps an unfancied team will embarrass one of the game’s grandees. Perhaps one of the super-clubs will stumble into the Europa League. But essentially, there’ll be 48 group games followed by the round of 16 ties to decide who gets to join Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Bayern Munich in the quarterfinals. Very predictable, very prosaic. Even moments of arresting beauty or brilliance seem diminished. When Barcelona hammered Celtic 7-0, my thought was not of the glory of the finishes of Luis Suárez or Andrés Iniesta but sadness for a structure that creates such mismatches. In the same round Borussia Dortmund put six past Legia Warsaw, Bayern Munich put five past Rostov, and Manchester City put four past Borussia Mönchengladbach.

Watching games like that, my mind goes back to a video from the end of the 1990s in which Neville Southall coaches a young goalkeeper who is put through a series of drills with Michael Owen. As Owen celebrates yet another goal, Southall says, with magnificent disdain, “Well done. He’s 13.” It’s Barcelona’s job, of course, to put on a show against whatever opposition they face, but what merit is there in eviscerating opponents who exist financially on a different plane? According to Deloitte, Barcelona’s revenue for 2016 was €560.8 million. For the year ending June 30, 2016, Celtic’s revenue was about a tenth of that, €59.55 million.