A tale about love. Florentino Perez described it as a tale of love. The president of Real Madrid sounded like a man enthralled with the mystery, the attraction, and the romance of a relationship that has lasted seven decades and so many memorable moments as he spoke to media as he was leaving Wembley Stadium following Saturday’s Champions League final.
“It’s a magnificent night because this competition is the one we like the most,” Perez said after Madrid, 2-0 winners over Borussia Dortmund, were crowned European champions for the 15th time. “It was created by Santiago Bernabeu (the club’s president from 1943 to 1978) along with L’Equipe newspaper and it made us important in the world. Some (clubs) leave and others come, but this competition is very much ours.”
There is a wonderful story behind this team: the all-conquering Madrid team that won the first five European Cups, spurred on by players like Paco Gento, Alfredo Di Stefano, and Ferenc Puskas; a sixth title in 1966, followed by an unimaginable 32-year wait before three titles around the turn of the century, a team lighted by the homegrown Raul Gonzalez and embellished by the arrivals of Luis Figo and Zinedine Zidane before the Perez-driven galacticos project lost its way; their resurgence over the past ten years, with a squad originally assembled around Cristiano Ronaldo and other A-list players but now extensively rebuilt around the young talent of Vinicius Jr., Rodrigo, Jude Bellingham, and, soon, a true galactico in Kylian Mbappe.
In the European Cup period, no club has made a greater contribution to the development of the sport. No club has advanced further in the game, though. On one level, it is a lovely relationship, especially with coaches like Zinedine Zidane and Carlo Ancelotti leading them, who have a personal history with the league that goes back to their brilliant playing years.
But when Perez seems out to destroy the Champions League as we know it, it is a peculiar type of love story. Even while he now has the idealized version of European football (a very lucrative league that is so exclusive that if the second-biggest team in Germany advances to the final, people will start talking about fairytales), it is still insufficient. There is never enough.
Football in Europe is, in one way or another, drawing closer to a turning point. This feeling has persisted for a number of years, as though the enormous financial advantages that the biggest, wealthiest, and most powerful teams in the biggest, wealthiest, and most powerful leagues have simply are not sufficient anymore.
Perez is in favor of the European Super League taking the place of the European Cup.Why? “We are doing this to save football at this critical moment,” he told Spanish television show El Chiringuito around the time of the failed ESL launch in 2021. “If we continue with the Champions League, there is less and less interest and then it’s over. The new format which starts in 2024 is absurd. In 2024 we are all dead.”
And now, it is 2024. Encouraged and emboldened by the recent Spanish court case verdict, Perez is still pushing the ESL concept and waging war on UEFA, which he accuses of controlling a “monopoly” on European football.
In response to the incessant calls for more games, UEFA has announced a new Champions League format for the upcoming season. Dubbed the “Switzerland model,” this format will see 36 teams play eight games apiece—not in a group format, but rather in a hypothetical 36-team “league” from which 16 teams advance to the knockout stage. Perez has referred to this as “absurd.” He could very well be correct.
It sounds big, complicated, and unmanageable—everything that competition from Europe should not be. Looked at as a hopeless, foolish attempt to follow the herd, European football actually needed UEFA to pull off the inconceivable feat of halting and turning the tide.
It is intended to appease the most powerful, wealthy, and large clubs’ demands. A few of us believe that, especially in the last 20 years, UEFA has acceded far too much, resulting in a financial model that has long-term disparities in competition between and within leagues. Perez and others have already determined that the improvements for the upcoming season do not go nearly far enough.
It felt a little nostalgic to watch Dortmund in the championship game again as I sat at Wembley on Saturday night and took in the excitement generated by their fans. It felt that way on Saturday night when they played Real Madrid, if not in 2013, when Jurgen Klopp called them a “workers’ club” up against a commercial powerhouse in Bayern Munich.
When Inter Milan faced Manchester City in the championship game the previous season, it was comparable. Although Inter has won the European Cup three times more than Manchester United, and in fact more recently, they too appear to have lagged behind in the contemporary era. In the 2000s, the Champions League’s later stages seemed to be their natural environment. Reaching the semifinals, let alone the final, was remarkable by 2023.
And that is only Dortmund and Inter, forget about other erstwhile powerhouses like Ajax, Porto, and Benfica (not to mention Red Star Belgrade, Celtic, and the rest). These teams are now much above the majority of their local competitors in the 21st century, yet they are still unable to compete financially with middle-tier Premier League teams, let alone the best of the Champions League.
The history of the European game is at such an odd point. The game of football itself is often incredibly fast-paced, extremely technical, and captivating. However, the framework of the European football model appears to be breaking down more and more due to the richest clubs’ demands for a growing income share and increased protection against underperformance, as well as their avarice and entitlements. Though there has been resistance to preserve wild-card spots for struggling major clubs, it is undoubtedly the direction of travel.
UEFA’s solution, as always, is to give the big clubs more of what they want — nevertheless not enough to satisfy the majority of them. Perez and others suggest that the most strong clubs take control of UEFA and be free to operate as they choose.
“To fix a problem, you have to first recognise that you have a problem,” Perez said in 2021 before making clear his belief that European football’s problem was not dubious ownership models, the spread of multi-club networks, a bulging fixture calendar or a chronic financial and competitive imbalance across the continent. The only problem he was interested in was the one that could be solved by “top-level games year-round, with the best players competing.”
Perez, however, does not always mean “high-level games” involving the top teams in the league. His goal is to find the most marketed matches. If Madrid’s Champions League campaign, which saw them play Napoli, Braga, Union Berlin, RB Leipzig, Manchester City, Bayern Munich, and Dortmund, left him feeling shortchanged, you have to imagine he would have preferred to have played Manchester United, Barcelona, and Juventus (who were eliminated in the group stage), as well as Manchester United and Liverpool (who failed to qualify). As long as his team, of course, prevailed.
The European rivalry over the last ten years has produced two major inconsistencies.
First, the quality of Madrid’s performances has seemed weird during this extraordinary run of supremacy in the Champions League era. This topic has been covered extensively elsewhere and is not particularly pertinent to this piece.
It is indeed peculiar that they have dominated a period but have seldom dominated matches against elite opponents. Pep Guardiola must be wondering how in the world his Manchester City team has only won one European Cup in the last seven seasons despite their consistent success, even outside of the narrow margins of knockout play.
The second paradox, which may or may not be related to the first, is that some of the largest clubs have failed miserably because of severe mismanagement at a time when they were accustomed to cash streams beyond their wildest expectations.
Their fiercest rivals, Barcelona, have flirted with financial disaster and have only made it to the Champions League semi-finals once in the last eight seasons; Manchester United, under the miserable and directionless ownership of the Glazer family, has only made it to two quarterfinals in the last thirteen seasons; Juventus, in the midst of winning nine straight Series A titles, made it to the final in 2015 and 2017, but as ownership and management problems worsened, they withdrew from the top division of European football.
It seems as though certain ownership regimes have been so preoccupied with increasing revenue streams and reshaping the future of European football that they have forgotten about the current state of their own clubs.
That is not a charge that could be made against the Perez administration. Overseeing Madrid’s transformation into a club that plays the transfer market shrewdly, constantly searching for the next big talents in world football (Vinicius Jr., Rodrigo, Bellingham, Brazilian teenager Endrick), and always respecting experience and knowledge while knowing when it is right to let a fading A-list talent grow old at the expense of another club, despite his obsession with his dream of winning the Super League and his power struggle with UEFA.
From somewhat similar financial positions, Barcelona and Manchester United have allowed dysfunction to take hold while spending vast sums of money in wildly irregular ways. Madrid, on the other hand, has created a winning environment, made wise personnel, and established a clear strategy.
They have undoubtedly also occasionally relied on good fortune in the Champions League. It is important to highlight the confidence Ancelotti and his players have showed in riding it as well as the good fortune they have received in some of their successful seasons, especially the last two. There is a much to enjoy about some of the individual success stories, such Jude Bellingham, Vinicius Jr., Toni Kroos, Nacho, Ancelotti, and Dani Carvajal.
But you have to look beyond the Champions League stage to find the most inspiring tales of the last few seasons in European football: the Europa League victories of Villarreal, Eintracht Frankfurt, Sevilla, and Atalanta, as well as the initial mockery of the once-disregarded Europa Conference League, which has been won by Roma, West Ham United, and Olympiacos.
It was genuinely amazing to witness the excitement in those celebrations, especially after Olympiacos defeated Fiorentina in the Conference League last week.
It has demonstrated that clubs that have been taught to accept their place in the 21st-century football hierarchy and be content with whatever scraps that might fall from the top table of European football still have vitality and ambition.
On their route to a third straight third-place Serie A finish, Atalanta once famously questioned whether they genuinely deserved a spot in the Champions League, according to former Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli. Few clubs in Europe have deserved it more when it comes to exceeding expectations and having better resources than others in recent seasons.
That is the lesson European football should take away from the last ten years, surely: that in 2024, upward mobility will still be necessary, that teams like Olympiacos can win a European trophy, that Atalanta, Bologna, and Aston Villa can still make it to the Champions League, and that Bayer Leverkusen can end Bayern’s Bundesliga monopoly. Leverkusen’s success under Xabi Alonso has been especially encouraging in a time when hope has been dashed and Bayern has been able to sleepwalk their way to several of its Bundesliga victories, frequently firing coaches along the way.
But in modern times, these kinds of love tales do not appear to last. Leverkusen’s finest players will inevitably be taken by teams higher up the food chain sooner rather than later, just as Klopp’s Dortmund team did, as will the Monaco team of 2016–17 and the Ajax team of 2018–19.
And at the top of that food chain are Real Madrid, the predatory team in sports, the 15-time European winners who have somehow managed to reclaim their hegemony in a period when they felt more threatened than ever.
After the final on Saturday, it was difficult to shake the impression that European football is about to face a period of uncertainty and seismic change because it has allowed its issues to accumulate over an extended period of time.
The most significant alteration to the Champions League for the upcoming season will be this complex “Swiss structure,” but whether it has the intended impact or not, you can image the Super League mob clutching to its success or failure as indisputable proof that drastic reform is required.
Appropriate leadership is required in the game. Someone has to take a stance and defend custom, risk, and the romance that permeates European competition history.
You may have assumed that person, upon hearing his encouraging remarks on his way out of Wembley on Saturday, would be the 77-year-old president of Real Madrid, the guy who speaks eloquently and respectfully about the European Cup and his club’s significant contribution to it.
However, Florentino Perez now views that connection in a new light. As far as love stories go, it gets more and more intricate.
(Photo: Visionhaus/Getty Images)
