A love story. Florentino Perez called it a love story. Speaking to reporters on his way out of Wembley Stadium after Saturday’s Champions League final, the Real Madrid president sounded like a man in thrall to the mystique, the allure and the romance of a relationship that has spanned seven decades and so many special times.
“It’s a magnificent night, because this competition is the one we like the most,” Perez said after Madrid, 2-0 winners over Borussia Dortmund, were crowned European champions for the 15th time. “It was created by Santiago Bernabeu (the club’s president from 1943 to 1978) along with L’Equipe newspaper, and it made us important in the world. Some (clubs) leave and others come, but this competition is very much ours.”
There is a beautiful story there: the all-conquering Madrid team that won the first five European Cups from 1956-60, inspired by Paco Gento, Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas; a sixth title in 1966, and then an unthinkable 32-year wait before three more around the turn of the century, won by a team illuminated by the homegrown Raul Gonzalez and embellished by the arrivals of Luis Figo and Zinedine Zidane before the Perez-driven galacticos project lost its way; their re-emergence over the past decade with a side initially built around Cristiano Ronaldo and other A-list talents, but now extensively rebuilt around the young talent of Vinicius Junior, Rodrigo, Jude Bellingham and, coming soon, a bona fide galactico in Kylian Mbappe.
No club have contributed more to the game’s growth in the European Cup era. Equally, no club have grown more with the game. It is, on one level, a beautiful relationship, particularly when they are led by coaches such as Carlo Ancelotti and Zidane, whose personal history with the competition dates back to their illustrious playing careers.
Perez wants to overhaul a tournament Madrid have dominated (Angel Martinez/Real Madrid via Getty Images)
But it is a strange kind of love story when Perez appears intent on killing the Champions League as we know it.
He has the European football landscape he dreamed of — a vast and enormously lucrative competition, so elitist that it now attracts talk of fairytales if the second-biggest club in Germany make it to the final — but it is still not enough. Nothing will ever be enough.
One way or another, European football is approaching a tipping point.
It has felt that way for several years now, as if the unprecedented financial advantages enjoyed by the biggest, richest, most powerful clubs in the biggest, richest, most powerful leagues just aren’t enough anymore.
Perez wants the European Cup to be replaced by a Super League. Why? “We are doing this to save football at this critical moment,” he told Spanish television show El Chiringuito around the time of the failed Super League launch in the spring of 2021. “If we continue with the Champions League, there is less and less interest, and then it’s over. The new format which starts in 2024 is absurd. In 2024, we are all dead.”
And now here we are in 2024. Perez is still pushing the Super League project, emboldened and encouraged by the outcome of the latest court case in Spain, and continuing to wage war on UEFA, the game’s governing body on this continent, which he has accused of running a “monopoly” on European football.
UEFA, for its part, has responded to the constant demands for more matches by introducing a new Champions League format from next season: the so-called “Swiss model”, where 36 teams will play eight games each, not in a group format but in a notional 36-team “league” from which 24 of them progress to the knockout phase. This is what Perez has described as “absurd”. And he might well be right.
It sounds… bloated, convoluted, unwieldy, all the things that European competition should not be. It looks like a forlorn, misguided attempt to go with the flow when what the game really needed was for UEFA to do the impossible by stemming and reversing the tide.
It is designed to placate the demands of the biggest, richest, most powerful clubs.
Some of us would say UEFA has acceded far too much over the past two decades in particular, creating a financial model that has created a chronic competitive imbalance between leagues and within leagues. Perez and others have already concluded next season’s reforms don’t go anything like far enough.
Sitting at Wembley on Saturday evening, soaking up the atmosphere created by their supporters, it felt like…