Uefa has only itself to blame for English clubs' mastery of Europe

Published on Friday 13 March 2009 21:15

WITH England's four representatives in the Champions League once again making up 50 per cent of the quarter-finalists – the others comprise two from Spain and one each from Germany and Portugal – the plea to introduce wage-capping by the Uefa president, Michel Platini, and, to a lesser degree, his Fifa counterpart, Sepp Blatter, will doubtless sometime soon be given another airing.

This proposal has been dressed up by Platini as a big-hearted attempt to create something closer to equality and competitiveness than exists at present. But, given his and Blatter's organisations' fondness for a line of zeroes before the decimal point at the bottom of a balance sheet, it exudes the malodorous scent of hypocrisy.

The present domination of the premier European tournament is no different from those that have gone before, but there is no recollection of any attempt at diminishing the supremacy of such countries as Italy and Spain in their pomp.

Platini may be genuinely alarmed at the prospect of the wealth of the Premier League having an unhealthy effect on the European game, but his notion of how to level the playing field is seriously flawed, not least because it is unworkable. In any society that operates on a free-market basis, no ruling body has the authority or the legal right to tell owners how to run their businesses or what to do with their money.

In any case, wage-capping – or belt-tightening, – is a measure that is self-asserting in difficult economic circumstances. It is an unavoidable consequence of hard times. If clubs throughout Europe are at risk of financial cataclysm as a result of striving to keep pace with the plutocrats of England, that is largely the offspring of imprudent management.

The many thousands, perhaps millions, of people who have taken an endowment policy as a means of paying their mortgages and been confronted with a serious shortfall on the date of its maturity will be distressingly familiar with the principle of uncertainty that governs financial affairs.

And those policy holders would, initially, have been given a much more re-assuring projection of future income than the vast majority of football club directors whose expenditure and budgeting would have been founded on nothing more substantial than the hope that success on the field would bring appropriate revenue. But there are indications now that the old owner/benefactor style of financing clubs is on the wane. In Turin, the Agnelli family no longer support Juventus in the manner of the late patriarch, Gianni. A similar change has occurred at Roma, where the death of Franco Sensi has left the club in the hands of his daughter, Rosella, with a resultant dwindling of enthusiasm for large injections of cash.

Even at Milan, Silvio Berlusconi no longer has the same urge to part with huge sums of money. The Italian billionaire retains a deep affiliation with the club and grimaces with each on-field reversal – to the extent that the veteran coach, Carlo Ancelotti, is said to be in peril – but the days of buying high achievement appear to be over. In England, of course, the most celebrated figure of all, Roman Abramovich, has made it plain that Chelsea from now on will have to be self-sustaining, free of the kind of financial input that has made the Russian owner the club's most powerful creditor, said to be owed around 550 million. At Blackburn, the family of the late Jack Walker had the sense not to try to fly higher than the fulfilment of the old man's dream. Having won the championship in 1995, Blackburn actually earned a fortune through the lucrative sales of their best players and have been ever since standing on their own feet.

In Scotland, it has long since been evident that clubs have been aware of the dangers of attempting stay abreast of the Old Firm. If this has led to an unbridgeable gap between the Glasgow giants and the rest, it is a penalty that is markedly less punitive than going to the wall.

If Platini is concerned about the domination of English clubs, he should look to his own office for a solution. After all, England's supremacy would be nothing like as emphatic if Uefa, in their own stampede towards self-enrichment, had not allowed four clubs from that country and others admission to their flagship tournament.