Should Bournemouth, Sunderland, Palace and Brighton be ‘excluded’ from Europe next season? | OneFootball

With Premier League teams in the final of every European competition and eight set to compete next year, is this how it’s going to be from now on?

The days of Harry Redknapp complaining about the curse of qualifying for Europe seem to have been consigned to the ‘rubbish that Harry says’ file, but  Premier League sides are massively financially dominant than all but a few European sides and they are likely to be their opponents in the latter stages of the Champions League at least.

For example, Aston Villa v Freiberg was a revenue/income battle of €450.2 million v €162.8 million and this isn’t unusual. So as good as a win might feel just now, it’s not really a fair fight is it?

Obviously Premier League clubs sometimes play badly and do get beaten but that is usually the only realistic chance a European club has. And as nearly half the league is in a European competition, they look set to dominate each year, unless they’re badly run or managed.

When victory is a new thing, the joy is understandable, but if it’s a regular thing, is it still as good? Winning is great but if you’re beating a team who has much, much fewer resources what sort of achievement is it really?

And what must everyone else think of the situation? It’d all feel a bit depressing wouldn’t it? Knowing that your journey would likely end as soon as you met an English team. It is supposed to be a competition after all and when one side has such grossly differing income available to them, that surely adversely affects the competitive nature.

The disparity is, if anything, growing wider, so Villa’s victory is likely not to be the last. I mean, even Bournemouth are the 26th richest club in the world now.

There have obviously always been disparities in wealth to some extent, that’s inevitable, but there has never been the absolute gulf there is now.

Look at the Conference League final. The wealth gap between Crystal Palace and Spain’s Rayo Vallecano is staggering. Even though both are top-flight clubs, Palace operate on an entirely different financial planet as the 25th richest in the world with €232.5m income against Rayo’s €60m.

If the situation was reversed I suspect we’d feel the competitions were effectively rigged against us. If a Premier League team doesn’t win at least the Europa and Conference League every year then they must be squandering all their free money and be run and managed by idiots.

It’s like asking a Fiat Panda to race and beat a sports car. Unless something goes wrong with the sports car, the Panda hasn’t a fair chance and while such things do happen, we are just relying on something unlikely and extraordinary to happen to make it a proper contest.

The games are commentated on as if it’s a contest of equals when it’s anything but because it’s rather embarrassing and it’s only never mentioned because they’re English.

During Villa’s game there was barely a mention of the financial chasm between the teams, which did seem dishonest.

It’s no coincidence that PSG and Arsenal are in the Champions League final and both are in the top 10 wealthiest clubs. It’s not a profound realisation that money wins, but what value does it achieve and why does football think it’s worthy of achieving?

This is all a no-brainer argument for a European Super League where relatively financial equals can compete against each other, while the rest of football can enjoy more competitive competitions. Surely this would suit UEFA because more fair competitions means more competitive football for everyone which would surely be more in demand, unless the football audience just wants predictability and to see the rich win everything. Even if they do they can still watch the ESL.

At the very least, if I was UEFA I’d seed or exclude the wealthiest 30 teams and exclude them from competing in the Europa and Conference Leagues while their finances are so much bigger than anyone else’s. The Premier League bull in the European china shop especially is breaking everything, sh*tting up the walls and ruining it for everyone else. If they can win a trophy just by being massively financially dominant then it ceases to be a proper sporting contest. It’s an achievement equal in status to your dad winning the 100 metres against 11 year olds on Sports Day.

This is just another way in which the English club’s greed for income is destroying the very thing about football that made them able to fill their pockets in the first place. It’s like killing yourself to live.