Ken Early: Super league may be best option for Europe’s bill-laden top clubs

Tuesday night should have seen Neymar back at Camp Nou for the first time since he left Barcelona four summers ago, but last week he got injured just in time to miss the Champions League knockout stages, as is tradition.

He’ll be missed, but even if he had been fit it’s impossible to imagine tomorrow’s match approaching the epic drama of the last meeting of these sides - the famous 6-1 win for Barcelona which was surely the most consequential Champions League match of the century.

Lionel Messi created an unforgettable image with his heroic pose of celebration - standing above the ecstatic Barcelona crowd, fist raised in exultation - but it was Neymar who had made the miracle happen. He scored an 88th minute free-kick and a 91st-minute penalty before chipping the assist for Sergi Roberto’s 95th-minute winner.

Last month Barcelona published accounts revealing their debt had ballooned to €1.173 billion

PSG were the first team to lose a Champions League tie after winning the first leg by four goals. Stung by the humiliation, their Qatari owners decided to give Barcelona a lesson in how the world really works. Neymar’s €222 million buyout clause was supposed to be absurd, but the fee was only an obstacle to football clubs, not petrostates.

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The effects of that sudden, random, gigantic injection of money cascaded unpredictably through the football system. The big winners turned out not to be PSG, for whom the €222 million man has played six Champions League knockout matches to date, but Liverpool.

They sold Philippe Coutinho to Barcelona for a chunk of the Qatari money, and used it to sign Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker, who helped them to English and European titles over the next two seasons.

Shattering impact

Even without hindsight it seemed like the big losers would be Barcelona, but it has only recently become clear just what a shattering impact the loss of Neymar had on the club. The aftershocks may yet bring down the structure of European football as we know it.

Last month Barcelona published accounts revealing their debt had ballooned to €1.173 billion. In typical Barcelona fashion, the news was accompanied by what seemed a covert attempt to deflect blame away from the executive management and towards the players, with the full details of Messi’s world-record pay deal published in the newspaper El Mundo under the headline “The Pharaonic Contract that is Ruining Barcelona.”

This was unfair. Yes, Messi’s contract, worth €555 million over four years, was more than the club could afford. But it was only one of a series of catastrophic financial mistakes that have, cumulatively, ruined Barcelona. The biggest ones are well known - Operation Dembélé, Operation Coutinho, Operation Griezmann, each a nine-figure transfer disaster - but there have also been many smaller mistakes: failed transfers, bloated contracts and so on. It all adds up. Then, just when you least needed it, along comes a pandemic to tear another nine-figure chunk out of your revenue.

The Bayern chairman, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, said that when he read about Barcelona’s debts he almost choked on his breakfast. “If we had these debts, I couldn’t sleep at night . . . I regret that clubs can borrow in this way,” Rummenigge said. “We at Bayern try to be exemplary . . . we pursue sporting success on the one hand, and economic stability on the other.”

That status quo was already falling apart before it had to absorb the shattering impact of the pandemic

Barcelona’s executives might think: easy for you to say. Bayern’s biggest competitor is a soft drinks company. The club most people think of as Germany’s number two, Borussia Dortmund, has accepted Bayern’s dominance as unchallengeable; rather than compete in the traditional manner, they have remade themselves as a talent launchpad geared towards making money from transfers.

(Remember that Dortmund’s first true mega-sale was Ousmane Dembélé to Barcelona - so their metamorphosis into a high-end player showroom is arguably another consequence of that Neymar deal.) It’s easy to be sensible when you can win without breaking a sweat.

Unlike Bayern, Barcelona face real competition at home - their main rival is historically Europe’s most powerful club. Competition means pressure, an overload of pressure creates desperation, and desperation is the common factor in all Barcelona’s mistakes. It’s significant that in 2017, the year Neymar walked, Real Madrid were reigning Spanish and European champions. It all fed into the desperation that made Barca offer Messi a half-billion euro contract that November, and to pay such enormous sums for Dembélé and Coutinho.

By now the question of who ruined Barcelona is less important than the question of what Barcelona are going to do about it. It’s plain that they need to come up with money somehow, and a seriously indebted club whose revenues have been suddenly choked by the pandemic will be prepared to consider ideas that may previously have been dismissed as too radical.

They are not the only ones in this situation. Serie A’s TV rights auction last week fell €100 million per season short of the league’s valuation - and Inter are the latest big Italian club to hit serious financial difficulties. In England, Liverpool, recently champions of everything, have been reduced to juggling loans in and out to plug gaps in defence. They now look likely to miss Champions League qualification, which would blow up their high-wage model. These developments will have heightened the already conspicuous interest their owners have displayed in breakaway plans.

In this context it was interesting to hear Luis Rubiales, the head of the Spanish FA, talk last week about the ways in which “football is evolving.” Rubiales argued that a breakaway European league would be a bad idea, but also said that domestic leagues had to think about what kind of concessions could be made to the big clubs’ urgent demands for revenue growth. Rubiales suggested silly-sounding ideas like cutting La Liga from 38 to 33 match days, to make room for “extra Clasicos”, which would fit into the schedule in some yet-to-be-explained way.

Arms race

The problem with any such incremental reforms is that they run up against the structural problem described by Arsene Wenger in a recent punditry appearance on beIN Sports.

“The future is to find a compromise between what the fans want and enough financial security for what the clubs need. Because anyway, you put €100 million more into the game, 90 per cent will go for wages.” That’s the arms race dynamic of European football: if you don’t pay the players, somebody else will.

What Wenger didn’t say was that the only stable escape from this dynamic is if these clubs band together into an NFL-type super league, creating a centralised entity that can guarantee revenues while making sure nobody cheats on spending.

The big obstacle to the creation of such a league in the past was not that fans don’t want it - although they don’t. It was that most big clubs were happy with a status quo that allowed them to dominate at home while making money in Europe.

That status quo was already falling apart before it had to absorb the shattering impact of the pandemic. For the first time, we may now have a critical mass of clubs desperate enough to push for an outcome that nobody really wants, because it’s the only way they can see to pay the bills.