Out of the final 16 of this season’s UCL, only five clubs come from outside the top 15 of Deloitte’s football money league.
FC Porto, FC Basel, Bayer Leverkusen, Monaco and Shakhtar Donetsk are highly impressive outfits and will no doubt provide their opponents with stiff competition. However, it is highly unlikely that any of them are genuine title contenders.
Every season, the correlation between high ranking in the Deloitte money league and success in the Champions League becomes more apparent as European football’s wealth becomes ever more concentrated in about twenty top clubs.
But the recent TV rights deal in the English Premier League, worth an astonishing $10.08 billion, has the potential to make the Europe’s top teams predominately English.
In fact, this is already happening in terms of wealth. All 20 EPL clubs appear in the top 40 of the money league, even before the riches of this latest television deal kicks in.
Even though Spain and Italy’s top clubs secure most of the revenue from their leagues, they are going to find it ever more difficult to compete for players and coaches with the likes of Southampton and West Ham United offering tempting salaries, let alone established big clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea.
As the top talent in world football gravitates more and more towards the riches on offer in England, the competition in the EPL is set to become ever more fierce, which will place even more pressure on the top teams to become even stronger.
This is excellent news for fans of the Premier League but it may come at the detriment of the UCL.
It’s obvious that a club like Juventus, which comfortably dominates in Italy, struggles once it faces the battle-hardened EPL sides.
Even the attacking stars of the mega wealthy Paris-Saint Germain had trouble opening up the supremely-drilled defensive unit of Chelsea, which is more than accustomed to keeping out similarly talented sides in England.
For clubs outside the large television markets of Europe’s major leagues, the task of competing in the UCL is becoming nearly impossible.
That’s because the size of the TV market and its purchasing power largely dictates the size of a club’s revenue.
Even in the Champions League where bonuses are given for performance, the majority of profit is generated through TV.
That’s why even though Porto won the competition in 2004, it still failed to make the most money.
There are two ways in which the future of European football will go.
The EPL will continue to grow its revenue base from television, making it by far the strongest league on the continent with its top clubs completely dominating the Champions League.
Or, the other path would be to make the revenue base more equal across Europe by creating a continental wide league.
As I’ve argued before, a European Superleague is the one way to make football more equal across the continent.
England’s second tier clubs will be the ones to suffer most.
I’m no believer in ‘trickle down’ economics but if there was some mechanism by which some of the money generated from a Superleague could be filtered down – say by forcing the clubs that leave their national competitions to pay compensation – then this may alleviate some of the pain.
Whatever happens, European football is set be dominated by a group of a super-rich clubs.
