Football has a problem – and Crystal Palace proved it
I can’t stress this enough: nobody is denying the glory of Aston Villa in Istanbul or Crystal Palace in Leipzig. They represented a first trophy in 30 years and a first ever European trophy respectively. They were heady nights, celebrated in hot foreign capital cities and in pubs and lounges back home. These are the big ones.
And on such evenings, nobody is expecting any partisan supporter to dwell for even a second on the systemic advantages that made their run possible. Anyone who supports Palace or Villa who thinks “Yes this was fun but actually the entire game is weighted towards this happening” is probably not fun at parties.
Both clubs would – rightly – point out that they are used to banging their head against their own glass ceilings. Villa have been limited by profitability and sustainability rules designed to curb financial implosion with a subsidiary impact of ringfencing the established financial elite. Palace have finished between 10th and 15th for 13 seasons in a row.
Still, this is a thing. There is growing unease about the potential domination of English clubs over European football’s second and third competitions. And there’s still Arsenal to come in the Champions League final…
What is the trend here?
For Premier League clubs, absolutely nothing. We have a system whereby multiple clubs from the same division can be in the same European competition and winners of those competitions also qualify for Europe the following season as a prize. For Villa, Palace, Forest and now Sunderland, Bournemouth and Brighton, this provides likely routes deep into continental competitions that would otherwise have seemed unlikely.
There has been some concern about growing Premier League dominance in the Champions League, but that hasn’t quite materialised (the last four finals have included two English finalists). The continued presence of established powers (Barcelona, Real Madrid, Barcelona) and Paris Saint-Germain’s new age of efficiency offers stiff enough competition, even if the names become familiar.
But below the Champions League, definite patterns. Three of the last four finalists in the Europa League and three of the last four winners of the Conference League were English and they cover almost a third of the Premier League’s clubs.
Why are Premier League clubs so dominant?
Money, money, money. The Premier League is the fourth most valuable sports league in the world but its rival leagues are typically governed (in the sense of financial strength) by a few select clubs: Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain. In the Premier League, revenues are so high that everybody is comparatively wealthy.
In the latest audited accounts (2024-25), 15 of the top 30 clubs in Europe ranked by annual income were English. No other league has more than four representatives and the majority of these typically compete in the Champions League.
Rayo Vallecano, Palace’s opponents in the Conference League final, had roughly the same annual wage bill as Sheffield United in the bottom half of the Championship. Aston Villa’s was roughly four times higher than Freiburg’s. Money isn’t everything, but it’s far closer to everything than nothing.
And Premier League clubs are getting richer. Each year their broadcasting revenue is higher. Each year they excel in Europe their prize money increases but so too does the number of spots they get in European competitions (nine in 2026-27). It becomes a cycle of self-fulfillment.
Is this a problem for Uefa?
There have been periods of dominance before: Italian clubs won all three competitions in 1990 and there was a long spell of English dominance in the European Cup in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But never before has one league held such a concrete advantage due to money. Nottingham Forest finished 16th in the Premier League, had four managers and still beat the champions of Portugal twice.
“We want to make our competitions more inclusive – to give clubs and fans the chance to dream and compete for European honours,” Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin said when launching the Conference League. “We have 55 national associations who make up Uefa and it is important to give clubs from as many federations as possible the chance.”
To an extent that is happening. There were clubs from Slovenia, Poland, Czechia, Cyprus, Croatia, Hungary and Denmark in the last-16 of the second and third competitions. But they really don’t have much chance to actually win anything, as has become clear.
The problem: competition is the oxygen of interest. The mainstream audience probably switched in for the semi-finals of the Conference League and the quarter-finals of the Europa League. There are a vast number of matches to end up with the final four teams that you could likely have picked from a list of six options.
What can be done?
Next season is a good test case for the hypothesis. Sunderland, Bournemouth and Palace are the three English Europa League representatives and will join Juventus, Milan, Leverkusen, Marseille and Benfica. If one of the English teams wins the trophy – and there’s no way to say that without sounding patronising – we can reasonably say that the Premier League owns the domestic game. Brighton will likely be favourites for the Conference League.
In terms of possible solutions:
- 1) A return to clubs dropping down from one competition to another, thus allowing foreign Champions League teams who finish outside the top 16 in the group stage to compete in the final stages of the Europa League (and from there to Conference League). I don’t really like the second chance principle, but it may generate competition.
- 2) Limit the number of clubs from each league in the two other European competitions and create extra spaces for mid-ranking European leagues. I think the best way to do this is to remove the prize of automatic qualification for the higher competition for the winner. Winning the trophy and enjoying the glory is the prize; you don’t need anything else.
- 3) Ban clubs from Europe’s top five leagues from the Conference League. It’s the nuclear option for sure, but if the original intention was to allow clubs from more of the 55 Uefa member states to have a chance of winning a trophy, why not take out the clubs who will almost certainly stop that ever happening?
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