- Arsenal seem to be favouritess but the question is just how far Tottenham can go
- Bayern Leverkusen v Arsenal: who is actually laughing now?
By Tony Attwood
Obviously, I rather like the idea of the “same teams all the time” in the Champions League if that includes Arsenal. And of course I know my football history well enough to know that in the early five or six years of what was the European Cup, it was the same winner all the time – Real Madrid. So when the Independent protests about the “same teams” stuff, I rather suspect either their journalist has forgotten the history of the competition, or maybe isn’t old enough to have lived through it
The same is pretty much true of the Premier League – we do occasionally have the fun of Tottenham slipping into the mire, but the days of a club winning the league and being demoted the next season are something of a myth.
And anyway, we haven’t got the same teams all the time because we have six clubs in the last 16 of the Champs League and that has never happened before. But the finances are with the Premier League: the crowds are there, the TV audience is there. And this is the nature of capitalism. If you have money, you get more money (unless you make a huge mistake). That is how modern football works, and the only time it doesn’t work is when a club gets far too big for its boots and has a maniac running the show who believes it is always the manager’s fault, never the owner’s fault.
That is what is happening to Tottenham now, and it happened to Arsenal during the 18 months of Emery’s reign. Fortunately for Arsenal, we brought in Arteta and kicked out Emery (although not unitl he’d spent all the money) and were prepared to put up with dropping out of Europe. Tottenham it seems can’t quite cope in the same way.
From the very start, Real Madrid were the richest team in the continent and so won the biggest prize over and over again. Smaller teams didn’t get a look in and so had to transform themselves. What’s more, a lot of Europe felt that one club winning a competition year after year (see for example Germany, and more recently France) was the norm. England, with different champions popping up quite regularly, was the outlier, not the model.
But that is the problem for the finance director of Uefa Andrea Traverso: when he speaks of growing revenues, what he means is growing revenues for a small number of clubs. Equality in football vanished decades ago with the abolition of the maximum wage.
It is sometimes noted that there are under a dozen clubs that have the money to be able to win the Champions League, although one of those (Tottenham) seems congenitally unable to get its house in order.
Now of course all this could stop by having strict financial regulations imposed, but that would seem to go against the spirit of open competition, which basically means, the rich can do pretty much what they want… as proven by Manchester City’s continuing ability to hold off a resolution to those 115 charges.
So Tottenham Ho still earn their money because their stadium is (at least this season) still full. But what if next year is a repeat of this year, except without qualification to Europe? Financial disaster looms.
Indeed, smaller clubs only seem to get into financial chaos when a new owner comes along promising the earth and spends his time sacking the people he just appointed (think of Nottingham Forest, Tottenham Hots, Chelsea…) it form.
Of course, big clubs tend to remain, while smaller clubs rise and fall (think about Leicester and Sheffield Wednesday, for example), and sometimes that brings us some entertainment. For surely most of us enjoy pompous oafs buying a club and announcing they transform it, but end up sacking manager after manager as the club sinks further and further into a financial mire.
Making a club into a big winner requires patience and faith. When Arteta took Arsenal down to 15th in the league, he wasn’t sacked, which he would have been at most other clubs. He was given time, although many seem to have forgotten what those early years were like.
So the question is not how to set up football so we get more little clubs like Bodo/Glimt rising to the heights, welcome though that is, but how to stop one club gaining total dominance as in the German league, and for a while in the Premier League, or two clubs doing that as in the Spanish league. Otherwise, competition goes out the window, not just for one year, but for decades.
Of course, I want Arsenal to win the Champions League and the Premier League but I want them to do it by beating decent competition.
