playCould Bayern offload Lewandowski in the summer? (1:29)
Gab and Juls talk about Robert Lewandowski. The first part of the story is over.
7:43 AM ET
If you are a fan of dramatic title races, you will probably not enjoy the European soccer season.
FiveThirtyEight gives the German giants a 97 percent chance of winning their 10th consecutive title. Paris Saint-Germain spent more than normal in response to last season's loss of the Ligue 1 title, and now lead by 11 points with a 98% title chance. Real Madrid and Inter Milan have the same amount of odds.
The vaunted Premier League, with its fat pockets and Big Six clubs, is looking at another season without a gripping race. Manchester City have an 80% title chance and lead by nine points. The hope of a gripping race ended when City won 12 consecutive league games. It was the only time in the last four years that the title was decided by less than seven points. Someone pulls away.
Powerful clubs ruling soccer is not a new concept. Real Madrid and Barcelona have combined to win 57 LaLiga titles since 1945, more than any other team.
It has been like this before.
In the 20 seasons between 1995 and 2014, the league was decided by five or fewer points 10 times. Between 1977 and 1995 and between 1997 and 2009, the title races in the Bundesliga were decided by zero or one point 10 times. During the current title streak, it has only been decided by single digits.
The European results from the mid-1950s are tracked by the Elo Football rankings. The winning team takes points from the loser, you get more points for beating someone better than you, and a lower-rated team can take points from a superior team in the case of a draw. It can be used as a running scorecard. It can show us how powerful clubs are.
The winningest clubs are taking more points from their opponents than they used to. At the end of the 1994-95 season, the Bianconeri were the top ranked team with 2,116 points, but they lost to Parma in the final of the UEFA Cup. The clubs finished third and fourth in the year-end ratings with 2,091 and 2,070 points.
In the 2004-05 season, those point totals would have been good for seventh, 12th and 13th. FC Salzburg are 23rd in the top 20 with 2,073 points, while the 15th place team, Borussia Dortmund, have 2,117 points.
Only two teams cleared 2200 points at the end of the season in the 50 years since. 11 teams topped 2,300 in the 2010s. Barcelona set a record in 2011; Real Madrid set a record in 2012; and Barcelona set a record in 2015. The number is 2,373.
On Saturday, January. 29
• Melbourne V v Wellington (1.30 a.m. ET)
• Fulham v Blackpool (9.55 a.m. ET)
• Peterborough v Sheff U (12.25 p.m. ET)
On Sunday, January. 30
• USG v Anderlecht (7.25 a.m. ET)
• Derby v Birmingham (8:25 a.m. ET)
• Cardiff v Forest (10.55 a.m. ET)
• Gent v Antwerp (11.55 a.m. ET)
• Kortrijk v Club Brugge (2.55 p.m. ET)
On Monday, January, there will be a meeting. 31
• Portsmouth v Charlton (2.40 p.m. ET)
You don't need fancy math to understand what we're seeing, just look at the table. The current Manchester City team has generated five of the six best point totals in the past five seasons. Since the beginning of the year, no English team has ever won more than 14 straight league matches. In Germany, no team had ever scored more than 2.32 points per game before the season began, and since then, every season since, except for one.
How did this happen? If the powers that be decided something should be done, what could be done about it? If nothing is done, how much further can the richest clubs go?
The push away from parity
It is easy to explain how we got here.
Over the past 30 years, every major development has pushed us away from parity. Transfer fees for out-of-contract players were not allowed in 1995 and player movement throughout Europe was increased. This has been great for players and their agents, but it came with a cost: some clubs were going to take advantage of it.
There is the European League. The conversion of the European Cup tournament into an actual league in 1992 increased revenue for those who were lucky enough to participate. The margin of error for the top clubs increased as a result of the expansion of the Champions League. They could spend accordingly if they counted on participation in the European club competition.
Money both in and out has skyrocketed in the past three decades, and the recipe for inequality has been baked right into the cake. Barcelona made 40 million more for losing in the semis than they did for winning.
The effects of all of this have been obvious, even though some of the biggest brands have been struggling at times. If the richest clubs had not pulled away from the pack, it would have been shocking.
Salary caps, player caps and playoffs
The potential fixes are easy to describe.
The existence of big-bads and inequality do not automatically serve the sport poorly. A Real Madrid- Barcelona final would likely draw a higher TV rating than a Sevilla-Atalanta final would. The Bosman ruling made club expenses go up in favor of the players. Even if the game&s mega-agents are getting more and more clout and cash from it, that isn't a bad thing.
The Pandemic years shined a bright light on the effects of inequality, bringing hardship to lower-level clubs and leagues and showing all the cracks in even the higher levels of the sport. The failure of the Super League showed us how difficult it is to bridge the divide between the haves and have nots.
Real Madrid president Florentino Perez and Barcelona president Joan Laporta still believe that the Super League was necessary to save the sport. Perez said that it was a format to prevent football from dying and that it would cure everything.
It feels like the war for the soul of the sport is being fought by the most soulless players. We know what potential fixes are out there.
The Financial Fair Play regulations were created to make sure teams spend less than they earn. As the surge of big-brand dominance of the 2010s suggests, it hasn't worked to limit spending or increase parity. The regulations have been too easy to fudge around with and have ended up punishing lower-level clubs above all else. That tends to trickle downstream.
A luxury tax for overspending and a salary cap are some of the regulations that may be included in a new set of regulations by the European soccer body. It is possible that it will rein things in a bit for the richest of the rich, as it has in some American sports leagues, but at the very least it will prevent Barcelona from piling up even more irresponsible levels of debt.
As the league races continue to lose drama, you can certainly find more discussions about changing league formats, such as adding an American-style playoff to the end, or creating multi-nation super leagues. None of these changes seem to be discussed by actual decision-makers.
There are a lot of things that could be done to create a more even playing field. It could dump the market pool. The solidarity payments that go to clubs and leagues further down on the totem pole could be increased. One of my favorite ideas is to lower the number of players a club can register. You could at least redistribute the talent if you could not redistribute the wealth.
How far can dominance go?
Where is the limit?
The biggest brands are always the biggest brands. It is a closed club, so to speak. Their level of dominance has increased, and while it is important to wonder how that could be curbed, it is also interesting to wonder how much further this can go. How much more dominant might the largest clubs become if money continues to flow upward?
In theory, we are approaching the limit, and not just from the perspective of the Bundesliga titles. Because of soccer's innate randomness and the fact that you can still fit only 11 players on the pitch no matter how much money you have, a lot of them will suffer injuries.
The top eight teams in the current ratings are: Manchester City, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Inter, and Ajax. They played 205 matches that were not against each other during their current league seasons. They have won 154 of them with 34 draws and 17 losses, good for 2.42 points per game.
Only four of the 17 losses featured a negative xG differential. They were the superior team in most of their losses. Even with injuries and the most recent COVID-19 variant creating a lot more player absences and odd lineups, it is hard for these top teams to improve on what they have done of late.
We have seen teams with more dominant results in soccer recently. That is something, right?
The best clubs in Europe during the 1990s were Real Madrid, AC Milan, Barcelona, Manchester United, and Juventus. There are a lot of familiar names. Their levels of dominance were not large enough to prevent Cinderella runs. In 1993, Marseille, along with other teams, won the European Championship. In 2004, a string of upsets gave us a Porto-Monaco final that officially introduced the world to Porto manager Jose Mourinho. The teams from Turkey, Russia, Zenit and Shakhtar were strong enough to win the Europa League.
Spanish, English and German clubs have won the past 11 and 10 editions of the European Championship, respectively. The best leagues have distanced themselves from the pack, the richest league has separated itself even further, and in a given year, a small handful of teams not only lords over all the rest but removes any drama from league title races more often than not.
Manchester United andArsenal have proved that obscene amounts of money don't guarantee world domination, and Barcelona's recent troubles have shown that having the fattest checkbook doesn't mean you're going to use it. New to the area, nouveau-riche Newcastle are finding out that simply throwing money at a problem might not draw in the right people.
randomness will still play a role in the outcomes of the sport. Sometimes Manchester City will lose points toSouthampton, and sometimes Lille will win the league title. A Financial Fair Play approach that actually works, and a slight cut of the player registration max and elimination of the damned market pool are just a few of the changes it would take to even the playing field. We will see if those in charge of the sport have the necessary skills to make decisions.
