Caught the Champions League final yesterday, as I always do, and I've been thinking about the narratives I could take from it. There were a few, the most obvious one being the fact mentioned in the title, which is that Chelsea and Manchester City were the first two members of the mooted European Super League to pull out when everyone got all up in arms about it.
I think the most interesting one, though, is the fact that this is the eighth final overall that was contested between two teams from the same country. If you narrow it down to the current era of Big 4 dominance (the big 4 being Spain, England, Germany and Italy), it's the sixth time this has happened since 2004, which was the last final in which a Big 4 team wasn't involved. It's also the third all-English final, compared with two all-Spanish finals in the same period (Real Madrid v Atletico Madrid in 2014 and 2016), and one all-German final (Bayern Munich v Borussia Dortmund in 2013). Prior to 2004 there were just two such finals, in 2000 (Real Madrid v Valencia) and 2003 (Milan v Juventus).
This has been my hobbyhorse for a few years now (or you could say for as long as I've had this blog), but I find that the increasing weight given to the Big 4 countries has distorted the competition in unfortunate ways. I understand the argument that viewers would rather see the stars of Madrid and Barcelona in the final, than Partizan Belgrade vs Benfica, to pull two teams out at random. Indeed, this was the reasoning behind the ESL, and the reason why I think that idea hasn't been killed off completely.
On the other hand, European games between teams from the same country are frequently less than stellar - the most recent example being the 2019 final, when Liverpool beat Spurs 2-0. This is just like when the biggest teams play one another in the league: they play more conservatively because they'd rather avoid losing than positively go out and win. Yesterday's game is a pretty good example, since there was just one goal, at the end of the first half, and Man City didn't manage any shots on goal after about 20 minutes.
I think this was one of the best arguments against the ESL, incidentally - part of what makes the European cup special is seeing match-ups that you wouldn't get to see normally, like Real Madrid against Manchester United or Barcelona vs Bayern Munich. But even before the ESL these match-ups were becoming commonplace - for instance two of this season's quarterfinals were rematches of the previous two finals (Bayern vs PSG in 2020 and Real vs Liverpool in 2019).
On top of that, the club of winners is growing increasingly rarefied. This may have been Man City's first Champions League final, but it was the third time Chelsea had contested it, and the second time they won. Indeed, Chelsea is the most recent first-time winner, having first won the tournament in 2012; before them the previous first-time winner was Borussia Dortmund, all the way back in 1997. Beyond Dortmund there were three other teams who won it for the first time in 1990s, among whom are Barcelona, and six who won it for the first time in the 1980s.
Of course, the reason it was so much more open then is that the tournament didn't feature so many teams from so few countries. That's also why we've started seeing so many match-ups from a single country - if half the places are already guaranteed to go to the top four teams from each of the top four countries (plus another three from France and two from Russia) then it's actually quite hard for none of the Big 4 to be represented in the final.
The odd thing about this type of match-up is how the teams have placed in their league. Man City won the Premier League pretty handily this season, while Chelsea just squeaked into fourth place on the final day, despite losing to Aston Villa. They notched up 67 points compared with Man City's 86, so it's pretty clear that over the course of the 380 games that made up this EPL season, City were the best team overall. Yet they lost to a team that performed nowhere near as impressively and had to make a mid-season managerial change.
Does that mean that Chelsea are actually better than City? No, even if City were hamstrung by Pep Guardiola overthinking his tactics and playing everyone out of the positions in which they did so well. But it also doesn't mean Chelsea aren't deserving champions, even if they only qualified for this tournament by coming in fourth in last season's EPL.
We can argue the merits of the current Champions League format all we want, but it's maybe a little sobering to think that the fourth-best team in England is better than any of the other champions in Europe. If that's true, then it says something about the gulf in class between the Big 4 leagues and those in the rest of Europe. The ESL wasn't aiming to fix that, but let's also not pretend that the status quo is in any way equitable.
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