This time, nobody can blame the draw. The last 16 of this season’s Champions League was a drab, largely unimpressive thing, salvaged to an extent by its final week as Arsenal came through a fraught second leg against Porto and Atlético Madrid came from 2-0 down on aggregate to eliminate Internazionale on penalties. But for the most part it was a plod of the predictable and the uninspired.
To an extent that was simply a function of the ties, a mixture of mismatches and clashes between sides who for one reason or another have been out of sorts this season. Even the meeting of the Spanish and Italian champions felt weirdly insignificant given how disappointing Barcelona and Napoli have been.
But the quarter-finals have no such issues: perhaps you would sub in Inter for Borussia Dortmund or Atlético, but these are pretty much the best teams in the competition, or at least eight of the 10 or so sides you would have expected to reach the quarter-finals.
And therein lies part of the problem. They are giants but they are familiar: three from Spain, two each from Germany and England and one from France. They are the same old teams in the same old patterns: three of the ties have been played 10 or more times in the Champions League era.
A certain amount of history adds to the richness of the narrative – no Arsenal fan, for instance, will need reminding that the last time they played Bayern Munich in the Champions League, they lost by an aggregate score of 10-2, crushing evidence even to the last believers that the Wenger era was over – but a sense of weariness cannot be avoided. This is what 30 years of hyper-capitalism in football have led to, the wages of pursuing an idea first lobbied for by Silvio Berlusconi.
The Champions League arguably reached its peak at the end of the first week of May 2019, as Liverpool overcame a three-goal deficit to beat Barcelona on the Tuesday and then Tottenham did the same against Ajax on the Wednesday. That was a time when it felt that the knockout stages of the Champions League were providing the best, most exciting sport in the world.
But even at the time there was a doubt about how we had reached that point, a realisation of the terrible cost to all but a small elite of concentrating resources (even if the most successful side in Dutch history and the club with the best stadium in Britain felt like insurgent forces).
A corollary of that was that elite clubs, unchallenged domestically, had essentially forgotten how to defend. That meant in turn wild swings and improbable comebacks, which may have been fun to watch but were a symptom of a rottenness at the heart of the game.
What has happened since is that the process that had led to one or two clubs dominating their national leagues has begun to play out on a continental level. The tendency towards monopoly is inevitable: a club are successful and are rewarded with prize money and bigger crowds/TV audiences, which generates more revenue that can be invested in players, coaches and facilities, increasing the chances of success and sending the cycle spinning again.
The Victorians recognised the danger when they established the Football League in 1887, and so had the home side pay a levy to the away side, dampening the advantage of bigger crowds. That’s why English football for a long time managed to avoid a super-club culture, why the most successful team in English history, Manchester United, have won only 16% of all English league titles, while Juventus have won 30% in Italy, Real Madrid 38% in Spain and Bayern 53% in Germany. But the practice was abandoned in 1981, not coincidentally as Thatcherite economics prevailed.
Covid accelerated the process. The financial domination of English football is almost total. That there are only two Premier League clubs in the quarter-finals says far more about specific issues at Manchester United and Newcastle than it does about the broader financial picture. And by removing two potential contenders, probably added to the sense of futility that hung over the last 16.
In the past year, signings by Premier League and Championship clubs were worth more than the Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A and Ligue 1 combined. That’s why the Real Madrid president, Florentino Pérez, continues to bleat about his super league; he knows his club have lost their position of dominance and that it will not return without major structural change.
But this draw perhaps gives the Champions League a chance, if not to redeem itself – European football is too determined to kill the golden goose for that – then at least to harvest a few more golden eggs.
A repeat of a semi-final in the past two seasons, Manchester City against Real Madrid, inevitably catches the eye. Two years ago, City were much the better side in both legs yet contrived to lose in preposterous circumstances. Last season their victory was forgettably straightforward, which often seems their curse: the first half at the Etihad was one of the great European performances, but there was so little sense of jeopardy that it is already almost forgotten.
Unless Madrid are much better than in the last round against RB Leipzig, it could be a similar story this season, even if City are not quite yet at last year’s level.
It will be a long time before Paris Saint-Germain can face Barcelona without bringing up memories of the 4-0 lead they squandered to Luis Enrique in 2017 (even if they did beat Barça easily enough the following season), but there is just a sense that, with the most extravagant of their celebrities moved on, they may, under Luis Enrique, have become a more serious side. And Xavi’s Barça are clearly vulnerable.
But what matters for the competition is less who goes through that how they do it. The Champions League seems to have slipped with incredible haste from unmissable spectacle to tiresome obligation. It needs life, it needs intrigue, it needs drama, it needs the sense that it remains unpredictable, that it is not a procession for the best-run of the super-clubs. And, frankly, if these ties cannot provide that, it may be that nothing can.
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