When Porto beat Monaco to win the Champions League in 2004, it felt like the start of a new era. And for José Mourinho, it was. He had won the Uefa Cup the previous season, but that success in Gelsenkirchen was his springboard to points records at Chelsea, a treble with Internazionale and his titanic struggles with Pep Guardiola when he was at Real Madrid. For two decades he has sulked and pouted his way around Europe, and for at least half of that time he was remarkably successful. But for European football as a whole that final marked the end of something.
In the previous 20 years, the competition had been a genuinely pan-European affair, with winners coming from nine different countries; in the 20 years since, there has been only one finalist from outside the big four of Spain, England, Germany and Italy – and that was Paris Saint-Germain, whose financial clout has very little to do with the general position of French football.
