The era of the mega-club and the taming of the underdog
Porto – Champions League winners in 2004. Will a team from outside the big leagues ever win this trophy again?
In 2004, Porto defeated Monaco in a Champions League final that is now best known for drum-beating the arrival of Jose Mourinho. Porto’s win capped a decade and a half that saw unfashionable clubs like Red Star Belgrade, Olympique Marseilles and Borussia Dortmund win the coveted title. Neither Porto nor Monaco had short odds on the betting slips before the tournament began, and their success added to the romanticism of the Champions League as a gloriously unpredictable level playing field.
That was then, this is now. Porto remain the last team outside the ‘Big 5’ leagues to win the tournament. They may well stay that way. The Champions League stakes claim of being the best annual sports tournament on the planet, but it is also essentially a playground for the big boys. You can guess with near-total certainty which teams will make the last 8, and one of the top three guesses usually wins.
Gone is the era where an underdog could justifiably hope to triumph. Football today is all about a different kind of beast; the mega-club, an entity that is too big to fail and succeeds for the sake of succeeding. Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and Barcelona are perennial Champions League favourites, and to a lesser extent, Manchester United and Juventus qualify as well. There is a stratification here as well – it is essentially about clubs from Spain, Germany and England competing to win the trophy, with Italy and France bringing up the rear.
Consider the statistics. In the first 54 years of European football, only four teams won the continental Treble (first division, the domestic cup and the European Cup). These were Celtic, Ajax, PSV Eindhoven and Manchester United. In the last 5 years alone, three clubs have gone the distance: Barcelona, Inter Milan and Bayern Munich. The last 5 finals have featured a grand total of 7 clubs, with Bayern Munich alone making it to three. Barcelona and Manchester United made two. Real Madrid reached three semi-finals in a row. The era of the mega-club is well and truly upon us.
With the gap between them and most of their domestic rivals increasing year by year, these teams are practically certain to win the league at least once every two years, and with a little extra effort the domestic Cup as well. That is a guaranteed Double; it’s just a question of when they can win the big ‘un. Had Barcelona won the 2011 Copa del Rey final (which they lost 1-0), they would have had a second Treble in three years. Bayern fell similarly short in 2010.
These major clubs have developed a suffocating presence over time. More imaginative teams cannot compete with their sheer financial brute force and are dismantled at the first available opportunity. In Germany, over the last decade alone, Stuttgart and Wolfsburg were stripped of their best players despite winning the league title because Bayern could pay them higher wages. Bayer Leverkusen met a similar fate in 2002. Till 2010, Valencia was a powerful team that boasted the likes of Juan Mata, Roberto Soldado, David Villa, David Silva and Jordi Alba. None of those players are with the club any longer, even as it slides towards mediocrity. Benfica was similarly torn up by Chelsea and Real Madrid.