The rich on their knees. Their teams failed

Clubs from the world’s richest competition, the Premier League, are out of Europe. Money did not help the Sheikh or Abramovich.

Russian billionaire and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, his compatriot and Arsenal co-owner Alisher Usmanov, and Arab Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al-Nahyan of Manchester City — none of these wealthy men will be celebrating triumph in the elite Champions League this year. Not a single one of the top teams from the world’s richest competition, the English Premier League, has made it into the last eight of Europe’s number-one cup. And that’s despite this trio of giants having such enormous income that they can afford to buy or pay the wages of almost any top footballer in the world. Why is it that, at the climax of this season, the Champions League will be without the wealthy English clubs? “First of all, especially Chelsea and also Arsenal lacked sporting luck. The enormous workload of key players during the season could also have played a role,” sports analyst and football agent Jozef Tokos told the Economic Daily.

A lot of money, a lot of problems
The last team that could have kept at least one English representative in the Champions League was Manchester City. On Wednesday evening, however, they were knocked out by Spain’s Barcelona after a 1–0 defeat. The same scenario of Premier League clubs’ misery happened two years ago — even then, no team from the “islands” made it into the last eight. “What bothers me about English football is that sheikhs came into Manchester City, Abramovich into Chelsea, and American owners into Liverpool. They are obsessed with foreigners, which is why the homegrown players of these clubs don’t get a chance,” Szilárd Németh, who played over a hundred matches in the Premier League and scored 28 goals, told the Economic Daily. Now a scout for the English giant Manchester United, he believes that the very financial strength of these teams might be causing their problems in European competitions. “Sometimes work with youth can, for less money, bring more benefit than buying expensive reinforcements. But you have to build a team for the long term — success will not come in just one or two years,” Németh notes.

Loss of lucrativeness
The fact is that for teams from the English Premier League, the Champions League is no longer as lucrative as it was, say, 15 years ago. This is mainly because teams from the “islands” are breaking records in sponsorship income and TV rights revenue. For comparison: while the money from Manchester United’s Champions League triumph in 1998 made up as much as a third of all income for the “Red Devils,” today it would be only ten, at most fifteen percent. “At the turn of the millennium, the Champions League was the most lucrative football competition in the world. Today, that status belongs to the Premier League. But I don’t think that means clubs give it less importance,” says Tokos. According to him, it is still about winning the most prestigious trophy, and in Champions League matches, players become heroes. But for Europe’s top competition to match the revenue growth of English teams, the winner’s prize would have to be not “only” €60 million, but roughly double.

Barcelona reach record progression
While English teams failed in the Champions League, the Spanish are dominating. Three of them reached the quarter-finals — Madrid clubs Real and Atlético, and FC Barcelona. And it was the latter whose qualification for the last eight set a new competition record. The Catalan giant will appear in the quarter-finals for the eighth time in a row — uninterrupted since 2008. The last team to knock Barcelona out in the very first round of the knockout stage was English Liverpool in the 2006/2007 season. Barcelona and the other seven teams will learn the name of their quarter-final opponents after today’s draw at the headquarters of the European Football Union in Nyon, Switzerland.