Has there been a great game in the Champions League group stage this season? Probably not. Even if there had been, it almost certainly didn’t mean all that much. But that’s the way of the modern game: an extremely protracted clearing of the throat before the real business begins.
Uefa will proudly tell the world that only six teams have nothing to play for in the final round of games on Wednesday, but whether it was worth 126 games to get to the mild peril of Napoli or Club Brugge possibly going out, or the questionable thrill of finding out whether Tottenham or Atalanta will have to endure the playoff round, is debatable.
That the reward for finishing in the top eight is not to have to play two further games is itself telling, an admission that there is too much football and that having to play a couple of extra games is now regarded not as a revenue-raising exercise but as an imposition.
As tournaments have expanded and proliferated, so fatigue has become a defining force. It perhaps explains why, as Tariq Panja observed this week on the Libero podcast, only Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain of the game’s elite seem better now than they were five years ago. And it probably explains why Premier League teams are so dominant at this stage of the Champions League but win it relatively rarely.
One image perhaps stands out from the group stage, which is that of Micky van de Ven running the length of the field to score Tottenham’s third goal in their 4‑0 win against Copenhagen in November, opponents hanging off him like Lilliputians trying to bring down Gulliver. That was an extreme case, but there were plenty of examples across the group stage of Premier League sides bullying physically smaller European opponents: Newcastle did it to Athletic, Arsenal did it to Atlético, Liverpool did it to Real Madrid and Chelsea did it to Barcelona.
To an extent, of course, that’s been true for at least 20 years, a reinvocation of the late 70s and early 80s, but with the advent of Long-Throw Britain, as English football has moved away from the Guardiola paradigm, it has become especially pronounced. Because Premier League clubs, en masse, are so much wealthier than the rest of Europe, they can buy the best players for their preferred model of play. That’s why, heading into this final round of games, there are six Premier League teams in the top 11, with only Manchester City outside the top eight who will skip the punishment round.
Given that level of domination, though, why have English clubs won only three of the past 10 Champions Leagues? A clue is perhaps offered by the experience of Italian clubs in the 90s, when Serie A was the dominant league in Europe. The situation was slightly different in that, barring the European champions, leagues were limited to a single participant until 1996-97, but between 1992 and 1998 there was an Italian team in the final every season. Only two of them won.
In part, of course, that’s the nature of knockout competition. There is a degree of randomness. But perhaps it was also the case that, come the final in May, the Italian team had been wearied by the exertions of the Serie A season in the way that, say, Ajax or Borussia Dortmund had not been by a season in the Eredivisie or the Bundesliga. That’s the issue English clubs now face.
It was striking last week how straightforward Spurs found their Champions League game against Dortmund compared with the Premier League matches against West Ham and Burnley that fell either side of it.
On the one hand there’s something viscerally thrilling about Djed Spence, pressed into service as a winger, tearing past Yan Couto every time he got the ball, but on the other it doesn’t feel quite right.
A lower mid-table Premier League side shouldn’t be able to treat the second-best team in Germany like a sixth-former playing against third‑years. Which is not to say that Dortmund in the Premier League would be in danger of relegation, rather that the expansive way of playing that works for them at home leaves them horribly vulnerable to the intensity of even a struggling English side.
When the quarter‑finals are played in April, though, Premier League teams are exhausted from a season of playing against other Premier League teams. That makes them vulnerable against the very best of the rest of Europe. It was notable that in the most recent Deloitte Football Money League, released last week, although there were six Premier League teams in the top 10, none of them is in the top four.
Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern and Paris Saint-Germain are able to compete financially with the best of the Premier League and by the business end of the Champions League, they have a significant advantage of freshness. That perhaps explains why last season Arsenal beat PSG comfortably in the group stage, but then lost against them in the semi-finals.
That example, of course, only underlines the futility of this stage of the Champions League. So long as a team get through, the group stage means very little. Liverpool didn’t benefit from topping the league last season, and it didn’t harm PSG that they finished 15th. All of this is essentially filler until we get to the real business of Euro giants against exhausted English clubs in the quarter-finals.
