On May 29, mighty Manchester City will take on fellow heavyweight Chelsea in the final of the European Champions League, but the soccer match could have featured scintillating Ajax battling Leipzig.
It is the glory of the Champions League and Europe’s domestic leagues that the minnows can swim with the tunas. Give a hearty cheer for the fans who rebelled last month when 12 of the wealthiest football clubs acted like sharks and tried to form a breakaway European Super League, where money, not merit, would count.
In case you missed it, the owners of power teams in England, Spain and Italy conspired to form a league where only the elite clubs would compete. None would ever be relegated to a lower division for poor performance. Other teams in Europe’s domestic leagues could not be promoted to the Super League, no matter how well they performed.
Those leagues don’t have playoffs per se, but the end of the season is a frenzy, as clubs near the top battle for spots in the Champions League competition and the ones near the bottom fight to avoid relegation to a second division.
Against 5,000 to 1 odds, Leicester City took the English Premier League title in 2016. Diego Maradona led humble Napoli to titles in Italy’s Serie A in the ‘80s. Fans of smaller clubs revel in victories over the big boys and enjoy simply the opportunity for their team to battle on a big stage.
In the Champions League itself, the big clubs usually prevail in the end, but an underdog can make a surprising run. In the last five years, lightly regarded clubs Ajax in the Dutch league, Monaco and Roma, with young stars, all made it to the semifinals.
Speaking of inclusivity, Dutch DJ Martin Garrix joins forces with Bono and The Edge of U2 to produce an inspiring song for Euro 2020, the soccer competition of European national teams that kicks off next month. “We Are the People,” video and song, looks a lot like those Pepsi World Cup ads, but the music and sentiments soar. Instead of soccer stars, this video celebrates regular people of all colors and ages connecting around the beautiful game, against glorious European backdrops, as Bono sings, “We are the people we’ve been waiting for, out of the ruins of hate and war.”
Bono didn’t make up the unity angle. He’s just identifying that essential characteristic of the world game, which the owners in the would-be Super League seemed to have missed.
When the Super League was announced in the dead of night on April 18 in an unsigned news release from the dirty dozen clubs, for whom the tens of millions each year from the Champions League was not enough, all hell broke loose. Champions League officials threatened to immediately drop the rebel clubs from the competition already underway. The British prime minister threatened legal action. Managers and players on every club, including the ones in the new league, slammed the idea in interviews and tweets.
The American owners of Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal were across the pond, but they could see Chelsea and Liverpool fans chanting and/or blocking team buses from their respective stadiums.
While debt-ridden Barcelona and Real Madrid cling to the prospect of a bailout from a super league, the six English clubs raced to back out less than 48 hours after the Super League was announced.
Shockingly, or fittingly, nearly half the dirty dozen clubs are in jeopardy of not even qualifying for Champions League next year. Chelsea, while impressive in its run to the final, has stumbled in the English league and might have to defeat Man City to even be in the 2022 competition. It could happen, maybe with Christian Pulisic, the first American non-goalie to actually star in Europe, leading the Blues.
Whoever wins, we can take comfort in knowing they took on all comers to earn the right to compete in the big game in Portugal. And the same will be true next year, with room in the pool for minnows and tunas.
