After Real Madrid's victory yesterday in the Champions League final, over Borussia Dortmund, the football podcasts I listen to have pointed out that this is Real's sixth win in the last 11 seasons, making for their fifteenth European Cup/Champions League overall. This is especially impressive when you consider that their previous run of six wins ended in 2002, but began in 1959, four years into their five-year streak of winning the competition (which was also, incidentally, the first five years that the European Cup was held).
You might say, correctly, that Real Madrid has gotten better at this competition. Indeed, during these past 11 years, they won it three years in a row, a feat that was last accomplished by Bayern Munich (1974-76), Ajax (1971-73) and Real itself (1956-60).
But there's a bigger picture, namely that the pool of winners has shrunk since the 1990s, and Real is just the most successful of these big-name winners. To put it another way, 2024 marks the 20th year in a row that a club from one of Europe's top four leagues (England, Germany, Italy and Spain) has won the Champions League. In that time, a club from outside those top four countries has reached the final just once (Paris-St. Germain in 2020, losing to Bayern Munich). Spain has won 10 of those 20 titles, compared with 6 for England, 2 each for Germany and Italy, and none for France (which, as I've said, may be numerically the fifth-strongest league but is nowhere near the top four).
By contrast, the previous 20-year period, 1985 to 2004, saw European Cup/Champions League winners from nine countries: the top four, plus France (1), Netherlands (2), Portugal (2), Romania (1) and Yugoslavia (1). In that period, the most successful country was Italy (6), followed by Spain (4), Germany/West Germany (2) and England (1).
England's performance is slightly skewed by the fact that English clubs were banned from Europe following the Heysel disaster in 1985. Prior to that, English clubs had won six seasons in a row between 1977 and 1982, and then again in 1984.
Looking at runners up, the picture between 1985 and 2004 is similar. Of the 20 clubs that played in a final but lost, six were from Italy, followed by four from Spain and three from Germany. England (1) and France (2) supplied the remaining runners up from the top leagues, along with Portugal (2), Romania (1) and the Netherlands (1).
Part of the reason for this skew toward the top four leagues is the fact that the Champions League began allowing multiple teams from certain countries in the 1997-98 season. Those leagues with the highest coefficients in the competition could have more teams enter, which allowed them more chances to improve their coefficient and further entrench themselves in the Champions League, at the expense of smaller (and generally poorer) leagues. To put it another way, before 1998 it was impossible for two clubs from the same country to meet in the final, but it's since happened eight times, of which six have been in the last 20 years.
The common refrain I hear when I bring this up is that people want to see the powerhouses play one another in the Champions League, and they don't care about seeing the champions of the Czech Republic or Romania or whoever. This may be true - but given that Steaua Bucharest reached the final twice in the 80s, it's conceivable that Romania's strongest club was competitive with the best of the continent and would have drawn more eyeballs than it would now. To me, this imbalance is more attributable to the fact that all the money and good players have gone to Western Europe and to the top four leagues in particular since the 1990s.
This situation isn't set to change anytime soon. Indeed, the Champions League is moving to a different format next season, which is a little too convoluted to describe here (I simply don't understand how it'll work), but the upshot is that the two leagues with the best performances will get an extra slot. What's more, depending on how participants shake down into their respective leagues, a single country could even have up to six teams in the competition.
These changes come in every couple of years as UEFA's rearguard action against the threat of a breakaway European Super League, like the one proposed in 2021. The biggest clubs want a guaranteed place in the competition, regardless of how well they actually play, and so whenever they threaten to break away, UEFA rejigs the Champions League to accommodate them. This way they've effectively managed to turn the competition into its own closed shop, untroubled by the great unwashed except for those times that one of said great unwashed actually wins their league (e.g. Leicester City in 2016).
England great Gary Lineker once said that football's a simple game: 22 men run around the pitch for 90 minutes and at the end the Germans win. The same is true of the Champions League, except substitute Real Madrid for "the Germans". This trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, since the other European finals featured at least one team from the Big 4: Atalanta beat Bayer Leverkusen in the Europa League, while Olympiacos beat Fiorentina in the Europa Conference League. That latter result is a welcome trophy for a non Big 4 team (indeed, Greece's first European club trophy), but the fact is that they beat a Big 4 team to it.
For another look at the future of the competition, think of this: Real Madrid's seen a lot more success since it ended its galactico policy of buying all the superstars it could find, and instead started building proper teams with depth. Imagine how successful PSG will be when it inevitably does the same?
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