Champions League: The 30 years of change shaping Europe's biggest prize
It is easy to forget
where the Champions League came from.
Three decades ago Uefa sometimes didn't know
what day games would be played until 48 hours before kick-off. In the first
Champions League season, some of the players were still part-time.
The 1992-93 inaugural edition started with two
knockout rounds between September and November. Leeds and Stuttgart ended up
playing a neutral venue decider for their first-round tie, in front of 90,000
empty seats at Barcelona's Nou Camp - after the German side broke Uefa's rule
on only fielding three foreigners.
Eight teams progressed to make two groups of
four, with games played from November to April. The group winners met in the
final. Marseille - who would have their 1993 French league title stripped over
match-fixing - beat AC Milan 1-0 on 26 May.
Rangers went undefeated but finished just a
point behind Marseille. Second to Milan were IFK Gothenburg.
"Before a home group game against Porto,
me and a friend were at work at 7am and then played at 8.45pm," recalls
ex-Gothenburg and Sweden midfielder Hakan Mild.
"We were semi-professionals. We trained a
lot, not less than Porto. But we didn't have the same financial situation.
"Portuguese media were there and made a
film for television. The TV people said it was unbelievable we were working and
it was not possible to beat Porto, who had a good team in that period."
Gothenburg won that match 1-0.
There was one club per country. The champions
of Scotland and Sweden were essentially semi-finalists. It sounds like a
quaint, bygone age - far removed from the global phenomenon we recognise now.
But it still represented a big break from what had gone before.
The European Cup had been going since 1955 but
the bigger clubs weren't happy with it. The 1980s saw periodic agitation for a
new - and more commercially rewarding - competition. AC Milan owner and media
giant Silvio Berlusconi was one of the ringleaders.
The argument - which remains to this day and
is at the crux of the controversial European Super League debate - was that
because the best supported clubs drive revenues by attracting the most viewers
on TV, they should get more money.
Uefa, just as it is now, was forced to
navigate the tightrope of giving those clubs what they want while trying to
maintain an inclusive competition.
"The clubs were always coming up with
proposals that could have more matches and guarantee more money," says
Gerhard Aigner, who served as Uefa's general secretary from 1989 to 2003.
"We still had a knockout system and in
the European Cup we had only one team from each country, so only five teams
from the five big TV markets. The same in the Cup Winners' Cup.
"But in the Uefa Cup, countries had more
than one team. There were more matches and more chances of clubs from the
bigger markets meeting. Commercially that became a competition that had more
potential than the European Cup.
"It became impossible. We realised that
if Uefa didn't act and take things in our own hands, we would probably lose
control of these competitions altogether."
Its new competition, the Champions League -
with its theme tune, its new broadcast package, its expanded format - was an
immediate success.
"We wanted to make it as attractive as
possible for the supporters, for TV and for the clubs themselves," says
Aigner.
"We managed to have two experts joining
us who had just left ISL [Swiss marketing company International Sport and
Leisure]. They had marvellous ideas and they developed great ideas about how to
present a new product to the public. We also looked across the ocean at the
American way of organising the Super Bowl.
"We not only could impress in terms of
finances, we could also impress in terms of presentation of the competition,
and probably also behaviour of the teams on the pitch.
"The players realised they were playing
on a different level. They were more conscious of the fact they were now on
this platform where they have to give a certain example. I don't know whether
that's still the case today, but during a certain time I had the feeling we
have a better product on the field than before.
"I think even the clubs themselves and
the respective national leagues were surprised how that was being done."
Aigner felt that Uefa had pulled it off,
appeasing the big clubs while maintaining sporting integrity and competitive
appeal. In 1992-93, defending champions Barcelona didn't make the group stage -
CSKA Moscow knocked them out.
But things would evolve very dramatically, and
very quickly.
Over the first two seasons of the new
Champions League, the English clubs involved - Leeds and Manchester United -
failed to make the group stage. In the inaugural campaign of 1992-93, Spanish
and German sides were absent too.
Uefa decided that to maximise income,
broadcasters from the richest European countries needed to be encouraged to
lodge higher bids. So changes came in for 1994-95.
The champions of eight countries - including
England, Italy, Germany and Spain - went straight into a group phase expanded
to make four groups of four.
As the qualifying process was stripped back,
22 national league winners - including those of Bulgaria and Norway - were
excluded altogether and shoved into Uefa Cup qualifying instead.
Then, in 1995, the Bosman ruling changed
employment regulations for football players. As a result, Uefa's rule that
clubs could only field a maximum of three foreign players (plus two who had
played in that country for an uninterrupted period of five years, including
three as a junior) had to be scrapped.
Former Rangers midfielder Stuart McCall
credits the '3+2' ruling with making his career. He was signed by the Scottish
club in 1991, the same year as '3+2' was introduced.
"People talk about Sliding Doors
moments," says Leeds-born McCall, now 58.
"In 1984 I was on the bench for England
Under-21s in Turkey. I was on the touchline to come on and that would have made
me English in terms of the representative game.
"But the referee blew his whistle and I
never got on. That allowed me to change my mind and become Scottish. If I had
got on, I probably would not have made my way to Rangers."
For Aigner, the Bosman ruling had a major
influence on how European football has been transformed since. But he also
looks back on "mistakes made" by Uefa.
He says: "We couldn't know about the
decision that would be taken in the European Court over the Bosman case. That
unbalanced the whole situation because those clubs who, until then, were able
to compete with their own talents on the highest level couldn't do it any more
as they started to lose their talents at a very early age.
"Also, we didn't get the financial
distribution model right in the national context because the money coming to
the clubs from Europe only went to those playing European football.
"But the other mistake we made was to
help the big clubs by giving four places instead of two. As long as we had two
and two had to qualify, the other countries with their champions had a real
chance. Now the door is too small for them to enter the competition."
In 1997, Lennart Johansson was Uefa president
and Aigner its general secretary when runners-up from the eight highest-ranked
leagues, according to Uefa coefficients, were allowed into the Champions League
for the first time. All eight entered at the final qualifying round and all
made it to the group stage. Seven out of the eight quarter-finalists that
season were from one of the 'big five' leagues - England, Germany, Italy, Spain
and France.
It was the start of a pattern. Every season
since has seen at least six of the last eight made up by teams from those five
leagues. On four occasions they've contributed the entire quarter-final
line-up.
In 1999-2000 there were further changes, with
four teams from the biggest three leagues allowed in, two through the
qualifiers. In 2009-10, three clubs from England, Italy and Spain went straight
into the group phase. In 2018-19 four teams from the biggest four leagues went
straight into the group phase and the number of qualification spots went down
from 10 to six.
Now 16 clubs from England, Spain, Italy and
Germany account for half of the group stage. These changes have meant more
games involving the richest clubs and most high-profile players.
And the biggest move is set to come.
In 2024 the Champions League will scrap the
group stage as it expands again, becoming a single league of 36 teams in which
each side plays 10 games against 10 different clubs, half at home and half
away.
Two of the additional four spots will be
allocated to teams who performed best in Uefa competition the previous season.
This season, Arsenal and PSV Eindhoven would have been invited in.
It is a controversial move, watered down from
initial proposals that would have rewarded teams based on their previous five
years' European performances, almost always favouring the biggest and most
successful countries.
Plenty don't like what remains.
"It is not the same. It is an industry
today," says 51-year-old Mild, who had four spells with Gothenburg between
1989 and 2005.
"It was not an industry 30 years ago.
It's maybe because I am getting older but it was more real in that period. It
was not fake. There was more heart in it."
The forthcoming expansion was negotiated
partly by Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli in his role as European Clubs'
Association (ECA) chairman. However, before it was launched Agnelli quit from
the ECA, along with representatives from all 12 clubs involved in the shambolic
European Super League (ESL) launch of 2021.
That idea has not gone away. A European Court
of Justice ruling is due in the spring on whether Uefa should have a monopoly
on organising pan-country international tournaments. If it comes down in favour
of Juventus, Barcelona and Real Madrid - the only clubs yet to formally
withdraw from ESL plans - the Champions League is unlikely to be around to
celebrate a 40th birthday.
"It's unfortunate," says Aigner, now
79.
"The sport's authorities can't really
exert [the] control that would be desirable for sporting reasons because of
competition rules.
"In my time, I sent someone out to
Australia to study what [Rupert] Murdoch had done to football [rugby league]
out there. It almost destroyed the game by creating a rebel league.
"But we see every day that money speaks
louder. We have the World Cup in Qatar. We have the example of the [LIV] golf
competition. Golfers are split in their feelings about that.
"I do understand the principle of open
markets and freedom and so on. But if you look at the Premier League, most of
the clubs belong to people from elsewhere. Is that what we want? Is that what
the government wants?
"What can be the interest of the owners
of the clubs in the UK in European football? Can they have an interest in
European football? I doubt it.
"I am afraid I am someone of an age who
still has the old values, which I would like to remain.
