Uefa’s president wants to improve competitive balance but the top clubs’ financial dominance equates to power too, and it is unlikely his mooted measures will make a significant difference

For football people raised on the foundational European Cup feats of Manchester United’s home-schooled Busby Babes and Celtic’s 1967 triumph with a team of local lads, the modern Champions League is a mixed blessing. Over the last 23 years the tournament has constructed a glittering stage for Lionel Messi and the world’s greatest players but European football’s concentration of wealth is delivering the final rounds and trophy itself to the same few richest clubs.

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This season’s tournament is following that inevitable trend, save for United’s torpid defeat by Sevilla and the fates delivering Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea to draw Cristiano Ronaldo’s Real Madrid and Messi’s Barcelona respectively in the first knockout round. The bank Itaú Unibanco, which has crunched the statistics partly to highlight the unbridgeable gap with South American football, has totted up that six clubs – United, Barcelona, Real, Bayern Munich, Juventus and Milan – accounted for 64% of Champions League finalists in the 21 years between 1995-1996 and last season.

In the draw on Friday are four of those six: Barcelona, Real, Bayern Munich and Juventus. The Premier League, whose collective financial power is double that of the next richest league, the German Bundesliga, this time provides Manchester City and Liverpool. Roma and Sevilla will hope, rather than expect, they are not only in the bag to make up the numbers.

This season’s competition has been characterised by the widening scale of these clubs’ victories. Even in the round of 16, which should be the honed-down knockout stage between rough equals after some inevitable imbalance in the groups, City beat FC Basel, the Swiss champions by 17 points last season, 4-0 away. Liverpool defeated Porto, the Champions League winners in 2004, 5-0 away; Bayern Munich beat Besiktas, the Turkish champions, by the same score at home. These trouncings follow various hammerings in the group stage, including PSG’s Qatar-funded galácticos beating Celtic 5-0 in Glasgow and 7-1 at the Parc des Princes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aleksander Ceferin, right, has suggested measures including salary caps, limiting squad sizes and strengthening the ‘locally trained’ players rule. Photograph: Thanassis Stavrakis/AP

Uefa’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, has repeatedly cited the need to improve “competitive balance” as the European game’s most pressing challenge and Uefa executives are studying the imbalance down to the winning differences and the numbers of meaningless minutes in matches.

But the top clubs’ financial dominance equates to power too, and it is unlikely that any of the early suggested measures will produce a substantial reordering. Ceferin has floated suggestions, which are in the very earliest stages of roughing out, including possible salary caps (opposed by the European Club Association), limiting squad sizes and strengthening the “locally trained” players rule, while steering clear of promising to substantially change the distribution of the money.

The tensions of his position reflect Uefa’s inherent conflict: it strives to be a governing body for European football while being the commercial organiser of the tournament that delivers glories and €1.3bn in prize money mostly to the elite few.

At the Uefa congress in Bratislava last month Ceferin promised to “fight tooth and nail to introduce measures that restore some balance”, while managing expectations for what he can achieve. “I cannot claim these will result in a club such as Steaua Bucharest or Red Star Belgrade being the next to have their name engraved on the Champions League trophy,” he said. “It is my responsibility to be realistic.”

The measures Ceferin has floated, complicated but worthy enough, nibble at the edges of the mountainous financial divide

Ceferin’s examples were apt, illustrating the period in which football success has distilled into the hands of fewer clubs. Steaua Bucharest beat Barcelona in the European Cup final of 1986 on penalties, and Red Star Belgrade’s victory over Marseille was in 1991, on the precipice of Yugoslavia’s descent into war and European football’s commercial divide. Names on the silverware since have included Ajax in 1995, Borussia Dortmund in 1997 and José Mourinho’s Porto in 2004 but even these exceptions have fallen away to the monopoly of the richest.

Uefa’s number-crunching in this year’s Benchmarking report produced the startling assessment that the revenue of the Premier League’s 20 clubs in 2015-16 – even before the current, much greater £8.4bn 2016-19 TV deals – was greater than the 597 top-flight clubs in all 48 European football countries besides Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey and Russia. These leagues dwarfed by England’s money-accumulating approach include historic football nations that have produced great European Cup competitors and winners in more even eras: the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Sweden and Scotland.

The crucial modern change besides the 1990s accelerations of pay-TV, sponsorship, merchandising and the other monetising of football’s appeal was the 1995 European court of justice ruling in the case brought by the player Jean-Marc Bosman. The most noted result was to grant players freedom of movement at the end of their contracts but the greater impact was to remove the previous restriction on the number of overseas players at clubs.

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These two gravitational pulls – top clubs’ soaraway earnings and the freedom to attract a wish list of international stars with stratospheric pay packages – have delivered World Cup-quality lineups at decreasingly few European clubs. So vast is the wealth required to pay such wages – United were the world’s highest-earning club last year with revenues of £581m – that City, PSG and Chelsea have been ascended into this elite only by £1bn-plus plutocrat injections of money from, respectively, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Roman Abramovich’s Russian oligarch bounty.

Ceferin knows his realistic limits to changing this tendency, given that Uefa relies for the Champions League’s commercial appeal on keeping the major clubs participating and therefore well-rewarded. Uefa has at the same time guaranteed more Champions League places to the top leagues. So the measures he has floated, complicated but worthy enough, nibble at the edges of the mountainous financial divide. Uefa’s executives are examining the practicalities and consulting but, realistically, major change to “competitive balance” is not expected any time soon.