• In each of the seasons between 2006-07 and 2008-09, the Premier League produced three of four Champions League semi-finalists.
• Whoever wins the Dutch league is worthy of a place in the Champions League group stage— and that is what needs addressing.
Image: /REUTERS
Ajax. It’s all about poor little Ajax. Uefa’s latest protectionist scheme is focused on favouring the underdogs.
Of course, it is. They’re all heart, as ever. Aleksander Ceferin, the Uefa chief, wants to give the Champions League semi-finalists, not just the winners, automatic qualification to next season’s event.
He was clearly moved by Edwin van der Sar’s speech at the European Leagues meeting in May, bemoaning that his club reached the last four of the Champions League, but would have to sell players this summer because there was no guarantee they would qualify for the group stage in 2019-20.
“We would like to protect teams like Ajax this year, or Monaco and Leicester City before,” said Ceferin.
“Ajax played the semi-finals this year and now they will have to sell all their players because they don’t know if they will qualify for the Champions League next year.”
Yes, but whose fault is that? Who guaranteed 19 of 32 group stage places to clubs from just five countries: England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France? Who made it such a closed shop that even winning the Dutch league, as Ajax did, no longer ensures a place in the Champions League group stage? That was Uefa. That was Ceferin’s lot.
France have produced one Champions League or European Cup winner in 64 years of competition —Marseille in 1993, a victory tainted by corruption after it emerged Valenciennes were paid to lose a league game, so Marseille would have more time to prepare for their final with Milan.
They were stripped of their league title and banned from defending their European crown the following season. Yet this hugely underachieving league gets three guaranteed places in the final 32, and the Dutch none.
Italy receive four, having produced a single European champion since 2007. No team in Germany beside Bayern Munich have won the Champions League since 1997, yet their fourth-placed team will also make it in, unchallenged. So that’s Ajax’s problem - not that semi-finalists aren’t getting an even break.
Let’s not pretend this is about championing upstarts, either. In the last 10 years, had semi-finalists received protected status, Real Madrid would have benefitted eight times, Bayern Munich seven and Barcelona six.
Ceferin threw Leicester into the mix because he ran out of recent semi-final surprises after two—Ajax and Monaco —but Leicester went out at the quarter-final stage in 2017 so their circumstances would remain unchanged.
Anyway, even knowing they had qualified for the Champions League did not stop them selling N’Golo Kante to Chelsea that summer. This is window dressing, no more, and potentially ruinous to a properly competitive league, as exists in England.
In each of the seasons between 2006-07 and 2008-09, the Premier League produced three of four Champions League semi-finalists.
Back then, automatic qualification would not have mattered because England had a top-four and little beyond. The teams who reached the semi-final were going to finish in the Champions League qualification places anyway. Yet the Premier League now has a top six, and maybe more, looking at teams such as Wolves and Leicester.
In Uefa’s brave new world, however, that fabulous competition at the top could be rendered partly or completely redundant if any combination of qualifiers—Manchester City, Liverpool, Tottenham and Chelsea this season— made it to the Champions League semi-finals.
Ajax have always been a selling club, as Van der Sar well knows— Ajax to Juventus, £5million, 1999—and had agreed to sell Frenkie de Jong to Barcelona in January, when they could still have won the Champions League and qualified for this season’s campaign automatically. But that’s not the point.
Whoever wins the Dutch league is worthy of a place in the Champions League group stage— and that is what needs addressing.
But it won’t happen because Uefa have enshrined the right of privileged mediocrities from Italy, Germany, England and Spain to finish fourth and still get in, guaranteed. In reality, these are the underdogs to which Ceferin is most loyal.